An inverse analysis is presented for simultaneous estimation of the source
term distribution and the boundary emissivity for an absorbing, emitting, a
nisotropic scattering, and gray plane-parallel medium with opaque and diffu
se bounding surfaces from the knowledge of the exit radiation intensities a
nd temperature at boundary surfaces. The inverse problem is formulated as a
n optimization problem that minimizes the errors between the exit radiation
intensities calculated and the experimental data. The conjugate gradient m
ethod and the two-dimensional network searching method are used to solve th
e inverse problem. The effects of the measurement errors, anisotropic scatt
ering, single-scattering albedo, optical thickness, and boundary emissivity
on the accuracy of the inverse analysis are investigated. The results show
that the source term and the boundary emissivity can be simultaneously est
imated accurately for exact and noisy data, and the estimation of boundary
emissivity is more sensitive to the measurement errors. (C) 2000 Elsevier S
cience Ltd. All rights reserved.