Some Direct and Inverse Problems for Inhomogeneous Media
Zhongyan Lin
1998

Several direct and inverse problems involving inhomogeneous media are studied in this dissertation. First we study the problem of constructing the pressure field excited by a timeharmonic point source in a shallow ocean with an interactive seabed. Both constant coefficient cases and variable coefficient case, elastic seabed and poro-elastic seabed are considered. A general procedure for solving this kind of problems is developed. The development of this procedure is based on the methods of integral transformation, Mitta-Leffler decomposition, generalized Fourier expansions, transmutation, symbolic and numerical computation. The second problem is to compute numerically the pressure field scattered by an object in a shallow ocean with an elastic seabed. All coefficients are assumed to be constant. We use the boundary integral equation method based on the fundamental singular solution for such a wave guide. We also discuss the algorithm for numerical computations, especially, for parallel computing. The algorithm is implemented on a parallel computer. The first inverse problem we study is how to reconstruct the radially dependent coefficient in a potential equation and a steady heat equation from a single pair of DirichletNeumann boundary data. A solution to this problem is derived by studying the forward problem thoroughly. A transmutation for inhomogeneous boundary data and with a singular kernel is used for constructing the solution to the forward problem in three different cases. Then the inverse problem is reduced to easier sub-problems. The last part of this dissertation is devoted to investigation of the inverse problem of reconstructing two radially dependent Lam'e coefficients of a ball simultaneously. This is a one-dimensional, multiple unknown, undetermined coefficient problem. A metric form transmutation is developed to represent the solution to the forward problem, which then enables us to determine the coefficients uniquely by suing only two sets of boundary data.