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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.

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.