Optimal Control Of Surface Shape

TL;DR

This paper develops a rigorous mathematical framework for controlling surface shapes via prescribed mean curvature, enabling precise surface design for self-assembly and material applications.

Contribution

It establishes existence, differentiability, and gradient computation for an optimal control problem involving surface shape with prescribed mean curvature.

Findings

Proved existence of optimal controls.

Derived first-order optimality conditions.

Provided numerical examples demonstrating control effectiveness.

Abstract

Controlling the shapes of surfaces provides a novel way to direct self-assembly of colloidal particles on those surfaces and may be useful for material design. This motivates the investigation of an optimal control problem for surface shape in this paper. Specifically, we consider an objective (tracking) functional for surface shape with the prescribed mean curvature equation in graph form as a state constraint. The control variable is the prescribed curvature. We prove existence of an optimal control, and using improved regularity estimates, we show sufficient differentiability to make sense of the first order optimality conditions. This allows us to rigorously compute the gradient of the objective functional for both the continuous and discrete (finite element) formulations of the problem. Moreover, we provide error estimates for the state variable and adjoint state. Numerical results are shown to illustrate the minimizers and optimal controls on different domains.