Study of Optimal Control Problems in a Domain with Rugose Boundary and Homogenization

Abstract

Mathematical theory of partial differential equations (PDEs) is a pretty old classical area with wide range of applications to almost every branch of science and engineering. With the advanced development of functional analysis and operator theory in the last century, it became a topic of analysis. The theory of homogenization of partial differential equations is a relatively new area of research which helps to understand the multi-scale phenomena which has tremendous applications in a variety of physical and engineering models, like in composite materials, porous media, thin structures, rapidly oscillating boundaries and so on. Hence, it has emerged as one of the most interesting and useful subject to study for the last few decades both as a theoretical and applied topic. In this thesis, we study asymptotic analysis (homogenization) of second-order partial differential equations posed on an oscillating domain. We consider a two dimensional oscillating domain (comb shape type) consisting of a fixed bottom region and an oscillatory (rugose) upper region. We introduce optimal control problems for the Laplace equation. There are mainly two types of optimal control problems; namely distributed control and boundary control. For distributed control problems in the oscillating domain, one can apply control on the oscillating part or on the fixed part and similarly for boundary control problem (control on the oscillating boundary or on the fixed part the boundary). We consider all the four cases, namely distributed and boundary controls both on the oscillating part and away from the oscillating part. The present thesis consists of 8 chapters. In Chapter 1, a brief introduction to homogenization and optimal control is given with relevant references. In Chapter 2, we introduce the oscillatory domain and define the basic unfolding operators which will be used throughout the thesis. Summary of the thesis is given in Chapter 3 and future plan in Chapter 8. Our main contribution is contained in Chapters 4-7. In chapters 4 and 5, we study the asymptotic analysis of optimal control problems namely distributed and boundary controls, respectively, where the controls act away from the oscillating part of the domain. We consider both L2 cost functional as well as Dirichlet (gradient type) cost functional. We derive homogenized problem and introduce the limit optimal control problems with appropriate cost functional. Finally, we show convergence of the optimal solution, optimal state and associate adjoint solution. Also convergence of cost-functional. In Chapter 6, we consider the periodic controls on the oscillatory part together with Neumann condition on the oscillating boundary. One of the main contributions is the characterization of the optimal control using unfolding operator. This characterization is new and also will be used to study the limiting analysis of the optimality system. Chapter 7 deals with the boundary optimal control problem, where the control is applied through Neumann boundary condition on the oscillating boundary with a suitable scaling parameter. To characterize the optimal control, we introduce boundary unfolding operators which we consider as a novel approach. This characterization is used in the limiting analysis. In the limit, we obtain two limit problems according to the scaling parameters. In one of the limit optimal control problem, we observe that it contains three controls namely; a distributed control, a boundary control and an interface control.