A modified coupled complex boundary method for an inverse chromatography problem

Adsorption isotherms are the most important parameters in rigorous models of chromatographic processes. In this paper, in order to recover adsorption isotherms, we consider a coupled complex boundary method (CCBM), which was previously proposed for solving an inverse source problem [2]. With CCBM, the original boundary fitting problem is transferred to a domain fitting problem. Thus, this method has advantages regarding robustness and computation in reconstruction. In contrast to the traditional CCBM, for the sake of the reduction of computational complexity and computational cost, the recovered adsorption isotherm only corresponds to the real part of the solution of a forward complex initial boundary value problem. Furthermore, we take into account the position of the profiles and apply the momentum criterion to improve the optimization progress. Using Tikhonov regularization, the well-posedness, convergence properties and regularization parameter selection methods are studied. Based on an adjoint technique, we derive the exact Jacobian of the objective function and give an algorithm to reconstruct the adsorption isotherm. Finally, numerical simulations are given to show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed regularization method.