A unified framework for analyzing the existence of ground states in wide classes of elastic complex bodies is presented here. The approach makes use of classical semicontinuity results, Sobolev mappings and Cartesian currents. Weak diffeomorphisms are used to represent macroscopic deformations. Sobolev maps and Cartesian currents describe the inner substructure of the material elements. Balance equations for irregular minimizers are derived. A contribution to the debate about the role of the balance of configurational actions follows. After describing a list of possible applications of the general results collected here, a concrete discussion of the existence of ground states in thermodynamically stable quasicrystals is presented at the end.

Critical points of a variant of the Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional, for which non-zero Dirichlet boundary conditions replace the fidelity term, are investigated. They are shown to converge to particular critical points of the corresponding variant of the Mumford-Shah functional; those exhibit many symmetries. That Dirichlet variant is the natural functional when addressing a problem of brittle fracture in an elastic material.

An alternative approach for the analysis and the numerical approximation of ODEs, using a variational framework, is presented. It is based on the natural and elementary idea of minimizing the residual of the differential equation measured in a usual Lp norm. Typical existence results for Cauchy problems can thus be recovered, and finer sets of assumptions for existence are made explicit. We treat, in particular, the cases of an explicit ODE and a differential inclusion. This approach also allows for a whole strategy to approximate numerically the solution. It is briefly indicated here as it will be pursued systematically and in a much more broad fashion in a subsequent paper.

We study minimal surfaces in sub-Riemannian manifolds with sub-Riemannian structures of co-rank one. These surfaces can be defined as the critical points of the so-called horizontal area functional associated with the canonical horizontal area form. We derive the intrinsic equation in the general case and then consider in greater detail 2-dimensional surfaces in contact manifolds of dimension 3. We show that in this case minimal surfaces are projections of a special class of 2-dimensional surfaces in the horizontal spherical bundle over the base manifold. The singularities of minimal surfaces turn out to be the singularities of this projection, and we give a complete local classification of them. We illustrate our results by examples in the Heisenberg group and the group of roto-translations. 


For a general time-varying system, we prove that existence of an “Output Robust Control Lyapunov Function” implies existence of continuous time-varying feedback stabilizer, which guarantees output asymptotic stability with respect to the resulting closed-loop system. The main results of the present work constitute generalizations of a well known result due to Coron and Rosier [J. Math. Syst. Estim. Control4 (1994) 67–84] concerning stabilization of autonomous systems by means of time-varying periodic feedback.

In this paper we study asymptotic behaviour of distributed parameter systems governed by partial differential equations (abbreviated to PDE). We first review some recently developed results on the stability analysis of PDE systems by Lyapunov's second method. On constructing Lyapunov functionals we prove next an asymptotic exponential stability result for a class of symmetric hyperbolic PDE systems. Then we apply the result to establish exponential stability of various chemical engineering processes and, in particular, exponential stability of heat exchangers. Through concrete examples we show how Lyapunov's second method may be extended to stability analysis of nonlinear hyperbolic PDE. Meanwhile we explain how the method is adapted to the framework of Banach spaces Lp, $1<p\leq \infty$. 


The purpose of this paper is to derive and study a new asymptotic model for the equilibrium state of a thin anisotropic piezoelectric plate in frictional contact with a rigid obstacle. In the asymptotic process, the thickness of the piezoelectric plate is driven to zero and the convergence of the unknowns is studied. This leads to two-dimensional Kirchhoff-Love plate equations, in which mechanical displacement and electric potential are partly decoupled. Based on this model numerical examples are presented that illustrate the mutual interaction between the mechanical displacement and the electric potential. We observe that, compared to purely elastic materials, piezoelectric bodies yield a significantly different contact behavior.

We consider a class of second-gradient elasticity models for which the internal potential energy is taken as the sum of a convex function of the second gradient of the deformation and a general function of the gradient. However, in consonance with classical nonlinear elasticity, the latter is assumed to grow unboundedly as the determinant of the gradient approaches zero. While the existence of a minimizer is routine, the existence of weak solutions is not, and we focus our efforts on that question here. In particular, we demonstrate that the determinant of the gradient of any admissible deformation with finite energy is strictly positive on the closure of the domain. With this in hand, Gâteaux differentiability of the potential energy at a minimizer is automatic, yielding the existence of a weak solution. We indicate how our results hold for a general class of boundary value problems, including “mixed” boundary conditions. For each of the two possible pure displacement formulations (in second-gradient problems), we show that the resulting deformation is an injective mapping, whenever the imposed placement on the boundary is itself the trace of an injective map.

Optimal control problems for the heat equation with pointwise bilateral control-state constraints are considered. A locally superlinearly convergent numerical solution algorithm is proposed and its mesh independence is established. Further, for the efficient numerical solution reduced space and Schur complement based preconditioners are proposed which take into account the active and inactive set structure of the problem. The paper ends by numerical tests illustrating our theoretical findings and comparing the efficiency of the proposed preconditioners.

In this work we study the structure of approximate solutions of autonomous variational problems with a lower semicontinuous strictly convex integrand f : Rn×Rn$\to$R1$\cup$$\{\infty\}$, where Rn is the n-dimensional Euclidean space. We obtain a full description of the structure of the approximate solutions which is independent of the length of the interval, for all sufficiently large intervals.

In this paper we study Lavrentiev-type regularization concepts for linear-quadratic parabolic control problems with pointwise state constraints. In the first part, we apply classical Lavrentiev regularization to a problem with distributed control, whereas in the second part, a Lavrentiev-type regularization method based on the adjoint operator is applied to boundary control problems with state constraints in the whole domain. The analysis for both classes of control problems is investigated and numerical tests are conducted. Moreover the method is compared with other numerical techniques.

We study Hamiltonian systems which generate extremal flows of regular variational problems on smooth manifolds and demonstrate that negativity of the generalized curvature of such a system implies the existence of a global smooth optimal synthesis for the infinite horizon problem. We also show that in the Euclidean case negativity of the generalized curvature is a consequence of the convexity of the Lagrangian with respect to the pair of arguments. Finally, we give a generic classification for 1-dimensional problems.

In this work we consider the magnetic NLS equation $$ ( \frac{\hbar}{i} \nabla -A(x))^2 u + V(x)u - f(|u|^2)u \, = 0 \, \qquad \mbox{ in } \mathbb{R}^N\qquad\qquad(0.1)$$ where $N \geq 3$, $A \colon \mathbb{R}^N \to \mathbb{R}^N$ is a magnetic potential, possibly unbounded, $V \colon \mathbb{R}^N \to \mathbb{R}$ is a multi-well electric potential, which can vanish somewhere, f is a subcritical nonlinear term. We prove the existence of a semiclassical multi-peak solution $u\colon \mathbb{R}^N \to \mathbb{C}$ to (0.1), under conditions on the nonlinearity which are nearly optimal.

We present below a new series of conjectures and open problems in the fields of (global) Optimization and Matrix analysis, in the same spirit as our recently published paper [J.-B. Hiriart-Urruty, Potpourri of conjectures and open questions in Nonlinear analysis and Optimization. SIAM Review49 (2007) 255–273]. With each problem come a succinct presentation, a list of specific references, and a view on the state of the art of the subject.

We consider continuous reformulations of the Euclidean travelling salesperson problem (TSP), based on certain clustering problem formulations. These reformulations allow us to apply a generalisation with perturbations of the Weiszfeld algorithm in an attempt to find local approximate solutions to the Euclidean TSP.

A general framework for computing robust controllable sets of constrained nonlinear uncertain discrete-time systems as well as controlling such complex systems based on the computed robust controllable sets is introduced in this paper. The addressed one-step control approach turns out to be a robust model predictive control scheme with feasible unit control horizon and contractive constraint. The solver of 1-dimensional quantified set inversion in modal interval analysis is extended to 2-dimensional cases for computing robust controllable sets off-line with a clear semantic interpretation, where both universal and existential quantifiers are concerned simultaneously. An interval-based solver of constrained minimax optimization is also proposed to compute one-step control inputs online in a reliable way, which guarantee to drive the system state contractively along the computed robust controllable sets to a selected terminal robust control invariant set.

The study of small magnetic particles has become a very important topic, in particular for the development of technological devices such as those used for magnetic recording. In this field, switching the magnetization inside the magnetic sample is of particular relevance. We here investigate mathematically this problem by considering the full partial differential model of Landau-Lifschitz equations triggered by a uniform (in space) external magnetic field.

A direct construction of a stabilizing hybrid feedback that is robust to general measurement error is given for a general nonlinear control system that is asymptotically controllable to a compact set.

We consider a mesoscopic model for phase transitions in a periodic medium and we construct multibump solutions. The rational perturbative case is dealt with by explicit asymptotics.

We are concerned with the asymptotic analysis of optimal control problems for 1-D partial differential equations defined on a periodic planar graph, as the period of the graph tends to zero. We focus on optimal control problems for elliptic equations with distributed and boundary controls. Using approaches of the theory of homogenization we show that the original problem on the periodic graph tends to a standard linear quadratic optimal control problem for a two-dimensional homogenized system, and its solution can be used as suboptimal controls for the original problem.