Optimal control of inductive heating of ferromagnetic materials (Q2872033)

The authors consider an optimal problem for an inductive heating process concerning ferromagnetic materials. Let \(D=B_{r}(0)\subset \mathbb{R}^{3}\) be a ball containing the torus \(\Omega _{1}=B_{r_{1}}(a)\times (0,2\pi )\) and the cylindrical domain \(\Omega _{2}=S\times (-h/2,h/2)\). The domain \( \Omega _{1}\) (resp. \(\Omega _{2}\)) represents the coil, that is copper conductor, (resp. the steel workpiece), and \(\Omega _{3}=D\setminus ( \overline{\Omega }_{1}\cup \overline{\Omega }_{2})\) is filled in with air. In order to describe the inductive heating process, the authors consider the Maxwell equations coupled with a heat equation. Considering a partition \( 0=t_{0}<t_{1}<\cdots <t_{M}=T\) of the time interval \([0,T]\) and simplifying assumptions, the authors introduce time-discretized eddy current equations in the domain \(D\) and a time-discretized heat equation in \(\Omega _{2}\). They also introduce a cost functional associated to a desired temperature distribution in a subdomain \(\Omega _{2}^{d}\) of \(\Omega _{2}\). Adding boundary conditions to the above discretized equations, they obtain a discrete-time optimal control problem, which is first put in an abstract framework. The first result of the paper proves an existence and uniqueness result for the time-discretized coupled problem. The proof essentially lies on the use of the Lax-Milgram theorem. The authors prove energy estimates for this solution. Then the authors prove the existence of a solution of the discrete-time optimal control problem. They here use a compactness argument, through Rellich-Kondrachov embedding theorems. The paper ends with the presentation of numerical results, the authors here using piecewise linear finite and lowest-order edge elements.