Existence, Uniqueness and Convergence of Simultaneous Distributed-Boundary Optimal Control Problems

We consider a steady-state heat conduction problem $P$ for the Poisson equation with mixed boundary conditions in a bounded multidimensional domain $\Omega$. We also consider a family of problems $P_{\alpha}$ for the same Poisson equation with mixed boundary conditions being $\alpha>0$ the heat transfer coefficient defined on a portion $\Gamma_{1}$ of the boundary. We formulate simultaneous \emph{distributed and Neumann boundary} optimal control problems on the internal energy $g$ within $\Omega$ and the heat flux $q$, defined on the complementary portion $\Gamma_{2}$ of the boundary of $\Omega$ for quadratic cost functional. Here the control variable is the vector $(g,q)$. We prove existence and uniqueness of the optimal control $(\overline{\overline{g}},\overline{\overline{q}})$ for the system state of $P$, and $(\overline{\overline{g}}_{\alpha},\overline{\overline{q}}_{\alpha})$ for the system state of $P_{\alpha}$, for each $\alpha>0$, and we give the corresponding optimality conditions. We prove strong convergence, in suitable Sobolev spaces, of the vectorial optimal controls, system and adjoint states governed by the problems $P_{\alpha}$ to the corresponding vectorial optimal control, system and adjoint states governed by the problem $P$, when the parameter $\alpha$ goes to infinity. We also obtain estimations between the solutions of these vectorial optimal control problems and the solution of two scalar optimal control problems characterized by fixed $g$ (with boundary optimal control $\overline{q}$) and fixed $q$ (with distributed optimal control $\overline{g}$), respectively, for both cases $\alpha>0$ and $\alpha=\infty$.Comment: 14 page

A free boundary model for oxygen diffusion in a spherical medium

The goal of this article is to find a correct approximated solution using a polynomial of sixth degree for the free boundary problem corresponding to the diffusion of oxygen in a spherical medium with simultaneous absorption at a constant rate, and to show some mistakes in previously published solutions.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures and 2 tables. Paper accepted, in press in Journal of Biological Systems (2015