Tackling the Complex Dynamics of Unsteady Flows

Controlling the behavior of flows around air, marine, and ground vehicles can greatly enhance their performance, efficiency, and safety. The high-dimensionality, strong nonlinearity, and multi-scale properties of these flows make effective control a tremendous challenge. Without the reduction of the state variable dimension and extraction of important dynamics, the application of dynamical systems and control theory for flow control remains a difficult task. Our research group focuses on developing physics-based approaches to model and control complex fluid flows by leveraging modal analysis, data science, network science, machine learning, and high-performance computing. Equipped with these toolsets, we can extract essential dynamics to facilitate the development of sparse and reduced-order models to design flow control techniques for high-dimensional unsteady fluid flows. We discuss some of the challenges and successes in characterizing, modeling, and controlling unsteady bluff-body wakes and stalled flows over wings. The techniques developed here are tested with DNS and LES for validations.

Live Zoom Event: <https://caltech.zoom.us/j/84737586094>

Box Recordings for Caltech: <https://caltech.box.com/s/ktk4t67cwdgqp2eky4duoxcahqqmt9hk>