Kirsten A. Morris

M. Sajjad Edalatzadeh, Dante Kalise, Kirsten A. Morris et al.

Optimal actuator design for a vibration control problem is calculated. The actuator shape is optimized according to the closed-loop performance of the resulting linear-quadratic regulator and a penalty on the actuator size. The optimal actuator shape is found by means of shape calculus and a topological derivative of the linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) performance index. An abstract framework is proposed based on the theory for infinite-dimensional optimization of both the actuator shape and the associated control problem. A numerical realization of the optimality condition is presented for the actuator shape using a level-set method for topological derivatives. A Numerical example illustrating the design of actuator for Euler-Bernoulli beam model is provided.

Mohamed Camil Belhadjoudja, Kirsten A. Morris

We consider the one-dimensional quasilinear heat equation with state-dependent heat capacity and thermal conductivity, and design a boundary-output observer based on the backstepping design for a linear heat equation with constant coefficients. Viewing the quasilinear system as a perturbation of the linear one, we establish exponential stability of the origin for the observation error dynamics in $H^1$, with an explicit region of attraction depending on the system parameters, observer gains, and the mismatch between the nonlinear diffusivity and the constant design diffusivity. Importantly, the observation error converges to zero rather than merely to a neighborhood scaling with this mismatch, even though, in contrast to backstepping-based stabilization of nonlinear PDEs, the mismatch need not decay along trajectories and may remain bounded away from zero, acting as a persistent state-dependent multiplicative perturbation. A technical challenge was to perform a sufficiently-fine Lyapunov analysis that does not yield overly conservative results such as mere boundedness of the observation error. Interestingly, while in the linear case the relationship between one of the backstepping observer gains and the convergence rate is monotonic, we show that in the nonlinear setting this is no longer the case: there may exist an optimal value of that gain, beyond which further increases deteriorate the system's performance. Such behavior cannot be predicted without our analysis: one might expect a priori the decay rate to be freely tunable at the expense of a region of attraction that shrinks to zero as the prescribed rate tends to infinity. However, our Lyapunov analysis (supported by numerical experiments) reveals that this intuition is incorrect.

Dante Kalise, Estefanía Loayza-Romero, Kirsten A. Morris et al.

Optimal actuator and control design is studied as a multi-level optimisation problem, where the actuator design is evaluated based on the performance of the associated optimal closed loop. The evaluation of the optimal closed loop for a given actuator realisation is a computationally demanding task, for which the use of a neural network surrogate is proposed. The use of neural network surrogates to replace the lower level of the optimisation hierarchy enables the use of fast gradient-based and gradient-free consensus-based optimisation methods to determine the optimal actuator design. The effectiveness of the proposed surrogate models and optimisation methods is assessed in a test related to optimal actuator location for heat control.