2017, Krejčí, Pavel, Rocca, Elisabetta, Sprekels, Jürgen

In the present paper, a continuum model is introduced for fluid flow in a deformable porous medium, where the fluid may undergo phase transitions. Typically, such problems arise in modeling liquid-solid phase transformations in groundwater flows. The system of equations is derived here from the conservation principles for mass, momentum, and energy and from the Clausius-Duhem inequality for entropy. It couples the evolution of the displacement in the matrix material, of the capillary pressure, of the absolute temperature, and of the phase fraction. Mathematical results are proved under the additional hypothesis that inertia effects and shear stresses can be neglected. For the resulting highly nonlinear system of two PDEs, one ODE and one ordinary differential inclusion with natural initial and boundary conditions, existence of global in time solutions is proved by means of cut-off techniques and suitable Moser-type estimates.

2014, Colli, Pierluigi, Gilardi, Gianni, Marinoschi, Gabriela, Rocca, Elisabetta

In this paper we study a distributed control problem for a phase-field system of Caginalp type with logarithmic potential. The main aim of this work would be to force the location of the diffuse interface to be as close as possible to a prescribed set. However, due to the discontinuous character of the cost functional, we have to approximate it by a regular one and, in this case, we solve the associated control problem and derive the related first order necessary optimality conditions.

2013, Hömberg, Dietmar, Petzold, Thomas, Rocca, Elisabetta

We study a model for induction hardening of steel. The related differential system consists of a time domain vector potential formulation of the Maxwells equations coupled with an internal energy balance and an ODE for the volume fraction of austenite, the high temperature phase in steel. We first solve the initial boundary value problem associated by means of a Schauder fixed point argument coupled with suitable a-priori estimates and regularity results. Moreover, we prove a stability estimate entailing, in particular, uniqueness of solutions for our Cauchy problem. We conclude with some finite element simulations for the coupled system.

2015, Barbu, Viorel, Colli, Pierluigi, Gilardi, Gianni, Marinoschi, Gabriela, Rocca, Elisabetta

In the present contribution the sliding mode control (SMC) problem for a phasefield model of Caginalp type is considered. First we prove the well-posedness and some regularity results for the phase-field type state systems modified by the statefeedback control laws. Then, we show that the chosen SMC laws force the system to reach within finite time the sliding manifold (that we chose in order that one of the physical variables or a combination of them remains constant in time). We study three different types of feedback control laws: the first one appears in the internal energy balance and forces a linear combination of the temperature and the phase to reach a given (space dependent) value, while the second and third ones are added in the phase relation and lead the phase onto a prescribed target phi*. While the control law is non-local in space for the first two problems, it is local in the third one, i.e., its value at any point and any time just depends on the value of the state.

2019, Lasarzik, Robert, Rocca, Elisabetta, Schimperna, Giulio

In this paper we prove the existence of weak solutions for a thermodynamically consistent phase-field model introduced in [26] in two and three dimensions of space. We use a notion of solution inspired by [18], where the pointwise internal energy balance is replaced by the total energy inequality complemented with a weak form of the entropy inequality. Moreover, we prove existence of local-in-time strong solutions and, finally, we show weak-strong uniqueness of solutions, meaning that every weak solution coincides with a local strong solution emanating from the same initial data, as long as the latter exists.