Optimal boundary control of a phase field system modeling nonisothermal phase transitions

Abstract

In this paper, we study an optimal control problem for a singular system of partial differential equations that models a nonisothermal phase transition with a nonconserved order parameter. The control acts through a third boundary condition for the absolute temperature and plays the role of the outside temperature. It is shown that the corresponding control-to-state mapping is well defined, and the existence of an optimal control and the first-order optimality conditions for a quadratic cost functional of Bolza type are established.