The use of a coarse BEM mesh to speed up the optimisation process in inverse electrical impedance tomography

A reduced model technique based on a coarse boundary element method (BEM) mesh is developed in order to increase the rate of convergence of a genetic algorithm (GA) used for solving a non-destructive evaluation problem. The inverse problem investigated consists of identifying the geometry of discontinuities in a conductive material with isotropic conductivity from Cauchy data measurements taken on the boundary. In this study we use a coarse BEM to provide problem specific information for the GA operators in order to detect efficiently, from a computational time point of view, an isotropic inclusion, such as a circle. The genetic algorithms based method developed is found to be a robust, fast and efficient method for detecting the size and location of subsurface inclusions.