Avoiding degeneracy in the Westervelt equation by state constrained optimal control

The Westervelt equation, which describes nonlinear acoustic wave propagation in high intensity ultrasound applications, exhibits potential degeneracy for large acoustic pressure values. While well-posedness results on this PDE have so far been based on smallness of the solution in a higher order spatial norm, non-degeneracy can be enforced explicitly by a pointwise state constraint in a minimization problem, thus allowing for pressures with large gradients and higher-order derivatives, as is required in the mentioned applications. Using regularity results on the linearized state equation, well-posedness and necessary optimality conditions for the PDE constrained optimization problem can be shown via a relaxation approach by Alibert and Raymond [2].