Optimal Control of the Landau–de Gennes Model of Nematic Liquid Crystals

DOI10.1137/22M1506158MaRDI QIDQ6135090zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Thomas Surowiec, Shawn W. Walker

Publication date 23 August 2023

Published in SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06421

zbMATH Keywords

adjoint equationdefectsfinite element methodnematic liquid crystals

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Semilinear parabolic equations with Laplacian, bi-Laplacian or poly-Laplacian (35K91) Optimality conditions for problems involving partial differential equations (49K20) Discrete approximations in optimal control (49M25) Finite element, Rayleigh-Ritz and Galerkin methods for boundary value problems involving PDEs (65N30) Statistical mechanics of random media, disordered materials (including liquid crystals and spin glasses) (82D30)

Abstract: We present an analysis and numerical study of an optimal control problem for the Landau-de Gennes (LdG) model of nematic liquid crystals (LCs), which is a crucial component in modern technology. They exhibit long range orientational order in their nematic phase, which is represented by a tensor-valued (spatial) order parameter $Q=Q(x)$. Equilibrium LC states correspond to $Q$ functions that (locally) minimize an LdG energy functional. Thus, we consider an $L^2$-gradient flow of the LdG energy that allows for finding local minimizers and leads to a semi-linear parabolic PDE, for which we develop an optimal control framework. We then derive several a priori estimates for the forward problem, including continuity in space-time, that allow us to prove existence of optimal boundary and external ``force controls and to derive optimality conditions through the use of an adjoint equation. Next, we present a simple finite element scheme for the LdG model and a straightforward optimization algorithm. We illustrate optimization of LC states through numerical experiments in two and three dimensions that seek to place LC defects (where $Q(x)=0$) in desired locations, which is desirable in applications.

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Cited in

(4)

• Optimal distributed control of a 2D simplified ericksen-Leslie system for the nematic liquid crystal flows
• Optimal boundary control of a simplified Ericksen-Leslie system for nematic liquid crystal flows in \(2D\)
• Linear numerical schemes for a \(\mathbf{Q}\)-tensor system for nematic liquid crystals
• The latent variable proximal point algorithm for variational problems with inequality constraints

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