This work is devoted to analyze a numerical scheme for the approximation of the linear heat equation’s controls. It is known that, due to the regularizing effect, the efficient computation of the null controls for parabolic type equations is a difficult problem. A possible cure for the bad numerical behavior of the approximating controls consists of adding a singular perturbation depending on a small parameter ε which transforms the heat equation into a wave equation. A space discretization of step h leads us to a system of ordinary differential equations. The aim of this paper is to show that there exists a sequence of exact controls of the corresponding perturbed semi-discrete systems which converges to a control of the original heat equation when both h (the mesh size) and ε (the perturbation parameter) tend to zero.

The aim of this paper is to answer the question: Do the controls of a vanishing viscosity approximation of the one dimensional linear wave equation converge to a control of the conservative limit equation? The characteristic of our viscous term is that it contains the fractional power α of the Dirichlet Laplace operator. Through the parameter α we may increase or decrease the strength of the high frequencies damping which allows us to cover a large class of dissipative mechanisms. The viscous term, being multiplied by a small parameter ε devoted to tend to zero, vanishes in the limit. Our analysis, based on moment problems and biorthogonal sequences, enables us to evaluate the magnitude of the controls needed for each eigenmode and to show their uniform boundedness with respect to ε, under the assumption that α∈[0,1)\{½}. It follows that, under this assumption, our starting question has a positive answer.