SHAPE OPTIMIZATION OF ELLIPTIC PDE PROBLEMS ON COMPLEX DOMAINS

Abstract

<p>This investigation is motivated by the problem of optimal design of cooling elements in modern battery systems. We consider a simple model of two-dimensional steady state heat conduction described by elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) and involving a one dimensional cooling element represented by an open contour. The problem consists in finding an optimal shape of the cooling element which will ensure that the solution in a given region is close (in the least square sense) to some prescribed target distribution. We formulate this problem as PDE-constrained optimization and the locally optimal contour shapes are found using the conjugate gradient algorithm in which the Sobolev shape gradients are obtained using methods of the shape-differential calculus combined with adjoint analysis. The main novelty of this work is an accurate and efficient approach to the evaluation of the shape gradients based on a boundary integral formulation. A number of computational aspects of the proposed approach is discussed and optimization results obtained in several test problems are presented.</p>