Abstract: | In this paper, the flow problem of incompressible liquid through an inhomogeneous porous medium (say dam), with permeability allowing parametrization of the free boundary by a graph of continuous unidimensional function, is considered. We propose a new formulation on an optimal shape design problem. We show the existence of a solution of the optimal shape design problem. The finite element method is used to obtain numerical results which show the efficiency of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |