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Adjoint-Based Shape Optimization and Optimal Control with Applications to Microchannel Systems
(2021)
Optimization problems constrained by partial differential equations (PDEs) play an important role in many areas of science and engineering. They often arise in the optimization of technological applications, where the underlying physical effects are modeled by PDEs. This thesis investigates such problems in the context of shape optimization and optimal control with microchannel systems as novel applications. Such systems are used, e.g., as cooling systems, heat exchangers, or chemical reactors as their high surface-to-volume ratio, which results in beneficial heat and mass transfer characteristics, allows them to excel in these settings. Additionally, this thesis considers general PDE constrained optimization problems with particular regard to their efficient solution.
As our first application, we study a shape optimization problem for a microchannel cooling system: We rigorously analyze this problem, prove its shape differentiability, and calculate the corresponding shape derivative. Afterwards, we consider the numerical optimization of the cooling system for which we employ a hierarchy of reduced models derived via porous medium modeling and a dimension reduction technique. A comparison of the models in this context shows that the reduced models approximate the original one very accurately while requiring substantially less computational resources.
Our second application is the optimization of a chemical microchannel reactor for the Sabatier process using techniques from PDE constrained optimal control. To treat this problem, we introduce two models for the reactor and solve a parameter identification problem to determine the necessary kinetic reaction parameters for our models. Thereafter, we consider the optimization of the reactor's operating conditions with the objective of improving its product yield, which shows considerable potential for enhancing the design of the reactor.
To provide efficient solution techniques for general shape optimization problems, we introduce novel nonlinear conjugate gradient methods for PDE constrained shape optimization and analyze their performance on several well-established benchmark problems. Our results show that the proposed methods perform very well, making them efficient and appealing gradient-based shape optimization algorithms.
Finally, we continue recent software-based developments for PDE constrained optimization and present our novel open-source software package cashocs. Our software implements and automates the adjoint approach and, thus, facilitates the solution of general PDE constrained shape optimization and optimal control problems. Particularly, we highlight our software's user-friendly interface, straightforward applicability, and mesh independent behavior.
Optimal control of partial differential equations is an important task in applied mathematics where it is used in order to optimize, for example, industrial or medical processes. In this thesis we investigate an optimal control problem with tracking type cost functional for the Cattaneo equation with distributed control, that is, \(\tau y_{tt} + y_t - \Delta y = u\). Our focus is on the theoretical and numerical analysis of the limit process \(\tau \to 0\) where we prove the convergence of solutions of the Cattaneo equation to solutions of the heat equation.
We start by deriving both the Cattaneo and the classical heat equation as well as introducing our notation and some functional analytic background. Afterwards, we prove the well-posedness of the Cattaneo equation for homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions, that is, we show the existence and uniqueness of a weak solution together with its continuous dependence on the data. We need this in the following, where we investigate the optimal control problem for the Cattaneo equation: We show the existence and uniqueness of a global minimizer for an optimal control problem with tracking type cost functional and the Cattaneo equation as a constraint. Subsequently, we do an asymptotic analysis for \(\tau \to 0\) for both the forward equation and the aforementioned optimal control problem and show that the solutions of these problems for the Cattaneo equation converge strongly to the ones for the heat equation. Finally, we investigate these problems numerically, where we examine the different behaviour of the models and also consider the limit \(\tau \to 0\), suggesting a linear convergence rate.