2015, Colli, Pierluigi, Gilardi, Gianni, Sprekels, Jürgen

A boundary control problem for the pure Cahn-Hilliard equations with possibly singular potentials and dynamic boundary conditions is studied and first-order necessary conditions for optimality are proved.

2016, Colli, Pierluigi, Gilardi, Gianni, Rocca, Elisabetta, Sprekels, Jürgen

In this paper, a distributed optimal control problem is studied for a diffuse interface model of tumor growth which was proposed by HawkinsDaruud et al. in [25]. The model consists of a CahnHilliard equation for the tumor cell fraction 'coupled to a reaction-diffusion equation for a function phi representing the nutrientrich extracellular water volume fraction. The distributed control u monitors as a right-hand side the equation for sigma and can be interpreted as a nutrient supply or a medication, while the cost function, which is of standard tracking type, is meant to keep the tumor cell fraction under control during the evolution. We show that the control-to-state operator is Fréchet differentiable between appropriate Banach spaces and derive the first-order necessary optimality conditions in terms of a variational inequality involving the adjoint state variables.

2010, Bartels, Sören, Müller, Rüdiger

A fully computable upper bound for the finite element approximation error of Allen-Cahn and Cahn-Hilliard equations with logarithmic potentials is derived. Numerical experiments show that for the sharp interface limit this bound is robust past topological changes. Modifications of the abstract results to derive quasi-optimal error estimates in different norms for lowest order finite element methods are discussed and lead to weaker conditions on the residuals under which the conditional error estimates hold.

2015, Liero, Matthias, Reichelt, Sina

In this paper we discuss two approaches to evolutionary Gamma-convergence of gradient systems in Hilbert spaces. The formulation of the gradient system is based on two functionals, namely the energy functional and the dissipation potential, which allows us to employ Gamma-convergence methods. In the first approach we consider families of uniformly convex energy functionals such that the limit passage of the time-dependent problems can be based on the theory of evolutionary variational inequalities as developed by Daneri and Savare 2010. The second approach uses the equivalent formulation of the gradient system via the energy-dissipation principle and follows the ideas of Sandier and Serfaty 2004. We apply both approaches to rigorously derive homogenization limits for Cahn-Hilliard-type equations. Using the method of weak and strong two-scale convergence via periodic unfolding, we show that the energy and dissipation functionals Gamma-converge. In conclusion, we will give specific examples for the applicability of each of the two approaches.