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Posted: 12 months ago by: Niklas Rom, COMSOL Employee | 3 Comments

Did you know that it is easy to set up certain kinds of inverse problems in COMSOL real quick with the aid of the Global Equations feature? Imagine this: instead of asking "how hot will the house get if I fire the boiler with three logs per hour", you ask "I want the living room to be 72 °F, how many logs per hour should I feed the boiler with?".

If you set up a heat transfer PDE problem, you can add an additional equation and a degree of freedom that specifies the extra condition on the temperature. Let's call it a global equation – as opposed to the local equation that the PDE represents. See how it is done in this knowledgebase solution: http://www.comsol.com/support/knowledgebase/1042/, under Global Constraint.

For more advanced inverse modeling, like materials selection and regularization, you may need optimization algorithms. More of that will be covered further down the road in this blog.