Some remarks on optimal insulation with Robin boundary conditions

Abstract We consider an optimal insulation problem of a given domain in $$\mathbb {R}^{N}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>R</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> </mml:msup> </mml:math> . We study a model of heat trasfer determined by convection; this corresponds, before insulation, to a Robin boundary value problem. We deal with a prototype which involves the first eigenvalue of an elliptic differential operator. Such optimization problem, if the convection heat transfer coefficient is sufficiently large and the total amount of insulation is small enough, presents a symmetry breaking.