Optimal control techniques for computing stationary flows of viscoelastic fluids

We consider the problem of computing the stationary flows of a viscoelastic fluid flowing through a given domain. The proposed numerical method is based on optimal control techniques, which replace the original equations of the problem by a minimization problem to be solved by a descent method. Such techniques are very powerful and can handle equations which change type, provided that, as done here, one uses an adequate preconditioning strategy and that one computes efficiently the gradient of the function to be minimized.