Comparison of Shape Derivatives using CutFEM for Ill-posed Bernoulli Free Boundary Problem

TL;DR

This paper compares three different shape derivative methods using CutFEM for an ill-posed Bernoulli free boundary problem, demonstrating their effectiveness through numerical examples.

Contribution

It introduces and compares three shape derivative approaches within a level set framework for free boundary problems using CutFEM.

Findings

All three approaches yield similar results in the Bernoulli problem.

The boundary value correction method offers a flexible alternative.

CutFEM provides high accuracy without re-meshing during optimization.

Abstract

In this paper we discuss a level set approach for the identification of an unknown boundary in a computational domain. The problem takes the form of a Bernoulli problem where only the Dirichlet datum is known on the boundary that is to be identified, but additional information on the Neumann condition is available on the known part of the boundary. The approach uses a classical constrained optimization problem, where a cost functional is minimized with respect to the unknown boundary, the position of which is defined implicitly by a level set function. To solve the optimization problem a steepest descent algorithm using shape derivatives is applied. In each iteration the cut finite element method is used to obtain high accuracy approximations of the pde-model constraint for a given level set configuration without re-meshing. We consider three different shape derivatives. First the classical one, derived using the continuous optimization problem (optimize then discretize). Then the functional is first discretized using the CutFEM method and the shape derivative is evaluated on the finite element functional (discretize then optimize). Finally we consider a third approach, also using a discretized functional. In this case we do not perturb the domain, but consider a so-called boundary value correction method, where a small correction to the boundary position may be included in the weak boundary condition. Using this correction the shape derivative may be obtained by perturbing a distance parameter in the discrete variational formulation. The theoretical discussion is illustrated with a series of numerical examples showing that all three approaches produce similar result on the proposed Bernoulli problem.