Existence of optimal shapes for heat diffusions across irregular interfaces

Abstract

We consider a heat transmission problem across an irregular interface -- that is, non-Lipschitz or fractal -- between two media (a hot one and a cold one). The interface is modelled as the support of a d-upper regular measure. We introduce the proprieties of the interior and exterior trace operators for two-sided extension domains, which allow to prove the well-posedness (in the sense of Hadamard) of the problem on a large class of domains, which contains regular domains, but also domains with variable boundary dimension. Then, we prove the convergence in the sense of Mosco of the energy form connected to the heat content of one of the domains and the heat transfer for ($\epsilon$, $\infty$)-domains. Finally, we prove the existence of an optimal shape maximizing the heat energy transfer in a class of ($\epsilon$, $\infty$)-domains, allowing fractal boundaries, while that optimum can generally not be reached in the class of Lipschitz domains.