Bilinear optimal control of the velocity term in a von Kármán plate equation (Q2865144)

The authors study an evolution von Karman plate equation written as \( w_{tt}+\Delta ^{2}w+b(x,y)w_{t}=\alpha [ w,F(w)]\) in \(\Omega \times (0,T)\), where \(\Omega \) is a bounded and smooth domain of \(\mathbb{R}^{2}\). The Airy function \(F\) satisfies \(\Delta ^{2}F(w)-[w,w]\) in \(\Omega \) with the boundary conditions \(F(w)=\frac{\partial }{\partial \nu }F(w)=0\) on \( \partial \Omega \). \([w,\phi ]\) is the von Karman bracket. The boundary conditions \(w=\frac{\partial w}{\partial \nu }=0\) are imposed on \(\Gamma _{0}\times (0,T)\) and \(\Delta w+(1-\mu )B_{1}w=0=\frac{\partial }{\partial \nu }(\Delta w)+(1-\mu )B_{2}w\) on \(\Gamma _{1}\times (0,T)\) where \(\partial \Omega =\Gamma _{0}\cup \Gamma _{1}\) and \(\Gamma _{0}\cap \Gamma _{1}=\varnothing \). Here \(B_{1}\) and \(B_{2}\) are differential operators. The initial conditions \(w(.,0)=w_{0}\), \(w_{t}(.,0)=w_{1}\) are imposed.NEWLINENEWLINEThe authors first prove an existence result for a weak solution to this von Karman problem. They indeed define the appropriate notion of weak solution and they claim that the proof of the existence of such a weak solution follows the lines of Theorem 1.1 in the paper by \textit{M. A. Horn} and \textit{I. Lasiecka} [Differ. Integral Equ. 7, No. 3--4, 885--908 (1994; Zbl 0806.35181)]. The authors then define the objective functional \(J(w,b)=\frac{1}{2}\int_{\Omega \times (0,T)}(w-z)^{2}dxdt+\frac{\beta }{2}\int_{\Omega }b(x,y)^{2}dx\) where \(z\in L^{2}(Q)\) is the desired evolution for the plate and \(b\) belongs to \( U_{M}=\{b\in L^{\infty }(\Omega ):-M\leq b(x,y)\leq M\}\), with \(M>0\). The main result of the paper proves the existence of an optimal control \(b^{\ast }\in U_{M}\) which minimizes the objective functional \(J\) on \(U_{M}\). The proof consists in analyzing the properties of a minimizing sequence. In the last part of their paper, the authors describe some properties of the solution among which is a characterization of this solution and a uniqueness result.