A FINITE ELEMENT - FINITE VOLUME CODE COUPLING FOR OPTIMAL CONTROL IN BUOYANCY-DRIVEN FLOWS

In this work a decoupling approach for solving optimal control problems in buoyancy- driven flows is presented. In detail a finite element code (FEMuS) is used for solving the adjoint equations while a finite volume code (OpenFOAM) is used for the state equations. In this way, we are able to leverage the variational nature of the finite element method to solve the varia- tional equations arising in the optimality system, while using a validated external code to solve the physical problem, without loss of reliability. The data transfer between the two codes is performed with the external library MEDCoupling. Some numerical examples are compared with the non-decoupled finite element solutions in order to validate the proposed approach