Non-linear inverse geothermal problems

• The inverse geothermal problem consist of estimating the temperature distribution below the earth’s surface using temperature and heat-flux measurements on the earth’s surface. The problem is important since temperature governs a variety of the geological processes including formation of magmas, minerals, fosil fuels and also deformation of rocks. Mathematical this problem is formulated as a Cauchy problem for an non-linear elliptic equation and since the thermal properties of the rocks depend strongly on the temperature, the problem is non-linear. This problem is ill-posed in the sense that it does not satisfy atleast one of Hadamard’s definition of well-posedness.We formulated the problem as an ill-posed non-linear operator equation which is defined in terms of solving a well-posed boundary problem. We demonstrate existence of a unique solution to this well-posed problem and give stability estimates in appropriate function spaces. We show that the operator equation is well-defined in appropriate function spaces.Since the problem is ill-posed, regularization is needed to stabilize computations. We demostrate that Tikhonov regularization can be implemented efficiently for solving the operator equation. The algorithm is based on having a code for solving a well- posed problem related to the operator equation. In this study we demostrate that the algorithm works efficiently for 2D calculations but can also be modified to work for 3D calculations.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Matematik -- Beräkningsmatematik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Mathematics -- Computational Mathematics (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

lic (subject category)