Optimal design problem with thermal radiation

Abstract

This paper is concerned with configurations of two-material thermal conductors that minimize the Dirichlet energy for steady-state diffusion equations with nonlinear boundary conditions described mainly by maximal monotone operators. To find such configurations, a homogenization theorem will be proved and applied to an existence theorem for minimizers of a relaxation problem whose minimum value is equivalent to an original design problem. As a typical example of nonlinear boundary conditions, thermal radiation boundary conditions will be the focus, and then the Fr\'echet derivative of the Dirichlet energy will be derived, which is used to estimate the minimum value. Since optimal configurations of the relaxation problem involve the so-called grayscale domains that do not make sense in general, a perimeter constraint problem via the positive part of the level set function will be introduced as an approximation problem to avoid such domains, and moreover, the existence theorem for minimizers of the perimeter constraint problem will be proved. In particular, it will also be proved that the limit of minimizers for the approximation problem becomes that of the relaxation problem in a specific case, and then candidates for minimizers of the approximation problem will be constructed by employing time-discrete versions of nonlinear diffusion equations. In this paper, it will be shown that optimized configurations deeply depend on force terms as a characteristic of nonlinear problems and will also be applied to real physical problems.