H.R. Clark

Theoretical and numerical local null controllability for a parabolic system with local and nonlocal nonlinearities

This paper deals with the null controllability of an initial-boundary value problem for a parabolic coupled system with nonlinear terms of local and nonlocal kinds. The control is distributed in space and time and is exerted through one scalar function whose support can be arbitrarily small. We first prove that, if the initial data are sufficiently small and the linearized system at zero satisfies an appropriate coupling condition, the equations can be driven exactly to zero. We also present an iterative algorithm of the quasi-Newton kind for the computation of the control and we prove a convergence result. The behavior of this algorithm is illustrated with some numerical experiments.