Identification of a relaxation kernel using two boundary measures

Abstract

We consider a distributed system with persistent memory of a type which is often encountered in viscoelasticity or in the study of diffusion processes with memory. The relaxation kernel, i.e. the kernel of the memory term, is scarcely known from first principles, and it has to be inferred from experiments taken on samples of the material. We prove that two boundary measures give a linear Volterra integral equation of the first kind for the unknown kernel. Hence, with two measures, the identification of the kernel, which in principle is a nonlinear problem, is reduced to the solution of a mildly ill posed but linear problem.