New engineering materials exhibit a complex internal structure that determines their properties. For thermal metamaterials, it is essential to shape their thermophysical parameters' spatial variability to ensure unique properties of heat flux control. Modeling heterogeneous materials such as thermal metamaterials is a current research problem, and meshless methods are currently quite popular for simulation. The main problem when using new modeling methods is the selection of their optimal parameters. The Kansa method is currently a well-established method of solving problems described by partial differential equations. However, one unsolved problem associated with this method that hinders its popularization is choosing the optimal shape parameter value of the radial basis functions. The algorithm proposed by Fasshauer and Zhang is, as of today, one of the most popular and the best-established algorithms for finding a good shape parameter value for the Kansa method. However, it turns out that it is not suitable for all classes of computational problems, e.g., for modeling the 1D heat conduction in non-homogeneous materials, as in the present paper. The work proposes two new algorithms for finding a good shape parameter value, one based on the analysis of the condition number of the matrix obtained by performing specific operations on interpolation matrix and the other being a modification of the Fasshauer algorithm. According to the error measures used in work, the proposed algorithms for the considered class of problem provide shape parameter values that lead to better results than the classic Fasshauer algorithm.
Keywords: Kansa method; inhomogeneous material; multiquadric collocation method; radial basis functions; shape parameter.