• Journal of the Korean Mathematical Society
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• v.44 no.6
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• pp.1397-1415
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• 2007

We consider an inverse heat conduction problem(IHCP) in a quarter plane which appears in some applied subjects. We want to determine the heat flux on the surface of a body from a measured temperature history at a fixed location inside the body. This is a severely ill-posed problem in the sense that arbitrarily "small" differences in the input temperature data may lead to arbitrarily "large" differences in the surface flux. A semi-discrete central difference scheme in time is employed to deal with the ill posed problem. We obtain some error estimates which also give the information about how to choose the step length in time. Some numerical examples illustrate the effects of the proposed method.