Initial temperature reconstruction for a nonlinear heat equation

Consider a cooling process described by a nonlinear heat equation. We are interested to recover the initial temperature from temperature measurements which are available on a part of the boundary for some time. Up to now even for the linear heat equation such a problem has been usually studied as a nonlinear ill-posed operator equation, and regularization methods involving Frechet derivatives have been applied. We propose a fast derivative-free iterative method. Numerical results are presented for the glass cooling process, where nonlinearity appears due to radiation.