Optimal control of a class of nonlinear heat conduction models

Abstract: We study an optimal control problem for a quasilinear parabolic equation modeling nonlinear heat conduction during heat treatment of metals. Under general assumptions, we prove existence of an optimal control and characterize the associated optimal control-state pair in a practically relevant framework. The main difficulty is the quadratic gradient term, which we handle through energy estimates and differentiability properties of the control-to-state map.