Automatic shape derivatives for transient PDEs in FEniCS and Firedrake

Abstract

In industry, shape optimization problems are of utter importance when designing structures such as aircraft, automobiles and turbines. For many of these applications, the structure changes over time, with a prescribed or non-prescribed movement. Therefore, it is important to capture these features in simulations when optimizing the design of the structure. Using gradient based algorithms, deriving the shape derivative manually can become very complex and error prone, especially in the case of time-dependent non-linear partial differential equations. To ease this burden, we present a high-level algorithmic differentiation tool that automatically computes first and second order shape derivatives for partial differential equations posed in the finite element frameworks FEniCS and Firedrake. The first order shape derivatives are computed using the adjoint method, while the second order shape derivatives are computed using a combination of the tangent linear method and the adjoint method. The adjoint and tangent linear equations are symbolically derived for any sequence of variational forms. As a consequence our methodology works for a wide range of PDE problems and is discretely consistent. We illustrate the generality of our framework by presenting several examples, spanning the range of linear, non-linear and time-dependent PDEs for both stationary and transient domains.