Control of the radiative heating of a semi-transparent body

Abstract

In a preceding paper, we have studied the radiative heating of a semi-transparent body $$\varOmega $$ (e.g., glass) by a black radiative source S surrounding it, black source at absolute uniform temperature u(t) at time t between time 0 and time $$t_\mathrm{f}$$ , the final time of the radiative heating. This problem has been modeled by an appropriate coupling between quasi-steady radiative transfer boundary value problems with nonhomogeneous reflectivity boundary conditions (one for each wavelength band in the semi-transparent electromagnetic spectrum of the glass) and a nonlinear heat conduction evolution equation with a nonlinear Robin boundary condition which takes into account those wavelengths for which the glass behaves like an opaque body. In the present paper, u being considered as the control variable, we want to adjust the absolute temperature distribution $$(x,t) \mapsto T(x,t)$$ inside the semi-transparent body $$\varOmega $$ near a desired temperature distribution $$T_\mathrm{d}(\cdot ,\cdot )$$ during the time interval of radiative heating $$]0,t_\mathrm{f}[$$ by acting on u, the purpose being to deform $$\varOmega $$ to manufacture a new object. In this respect, we introduce the appropriate cost functional and the set of admissible controls $$U_\mathrm{ad}$$ , for which we prove the existence of optimal controls. Introducing the state space and the state equation, a first-order necessary condition for a control $$u:t \mapsto u(t)$$ to be optimal is then derived in the form of a Variational Inequality by using the implicit function theorem and the adjoint problem. We close this paper by some numerical considerations.