Coupled actuator placement and controller design for electromagnetic heating by means of dynamic optimization

An approach is presented for the optimal actuator placement in the course of electromagnetic heating. As this problem strongly depends on the control inputs for the actuators, the approach is incorporated into a suitable optimization framework for the control design of multiphysics systems. A joint optimization problem is formulated for both the actuator placement and the controller design problem. The adjoint-based sensitivity analysis in conjunction with the formal Lagrangian technique is applied to derive the optimality conditions. Simulation results for a surface hardening process demonstrate the applicability and accuracy of the approach.