Copyright © 2012 Xiuming Li and Suping Qian. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper investigates the inverse problem of determining a heat source in the parabolic heat equation using the usual conditions. Firstly, the problem is reduced to an equivalent problem which is easy to handle using variational iteration method. Secondly, variational iteration method is used to solve the reduced problem. Using this method a rapid convergent sequence can be produced which tends to the exact solution of the problem. Furthermore, variational iteration method does not require the discretization of the problem. Two numerical examples are presented to illustrate the strength of the method.