Optimal control of time discrete two-phase flow governed by a diffuse interface model

We present results on optimal control of two-phase flows. The fluid is modeled by a thermodynamically consistent diffuse interface model and allows to treat fluids of different densities and viscosities. In earlier work we proposed an energy stable time discretization for this model that we now employ to derive existence of optimal controls for a time discrete optimal control problem. The control aim is to obtain a desired distribution of the two phases in the system. For this we investigate three control actions. We use tangential Dirichlet boundary control and distributed control. We further consider the inverse problem of finding an initial distribution such that the evolution over a given time horizon starting from this value is close to a desired distribution. (© 2016 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)