A shape-optimization technique for the capillary surface problem (Q913221)

The study proposes a method to construct the capillary surface, based on the shape-optimization technique. The problem of determination of a capillary surface is reformulated as an optimization problem over an admissible class of sets and an existence theorem for the optimal solution is proved. A numerical scheme is proposed based on the gradient method where the gradients are calculated with respect to the variation of the domain in the admissible class in the form of nodes of the finite elements. Some model problems have actually been solved.