Piecewise optimal distributed Controls for 2D Boussinesq equations

In this article, we study the dynamics of a piecewise (in time) distributed optimal control problem for the Boussinesq equations which model velocity tracking over time coupled to thermal dynamics. We also study the dynamics of semidiscrete approximation of this problem. We prove that the rates of velocity tracking coupled to thermal dynamics are exponential and that the difference between the solution of the semi‐discrete piecewise optimal control problem and the desired states in L² and H¹ norms decay to zero exponentially as n→∞. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.