Section: Research Program

Reduced-order models

Massive parallelization and rethinking of numerical schemes will allow the solution of new problem in physics and the prediction of new phenomena thanks to simulation. However, in industrial applications fast on line responses are needed for design and control. For instance, in the design process of an aircraft, the flight conditions and manoeuvres, which provide the largest aircraft loads, are not known a priori. Therefore the aerodynamic and inertial forces are calculated at a large number of conditions to give an estimate of the maximum loads, and hence stresses, that the structure of the detailed aircraft design will experience in service. A simplistic estimate of the number of analyses required would multiply the numbers of conditions to give ${10}^7$. Even with simplistic models of the aircraft behavior this is an unfeasible number of separate simulations. However, engineering experience is used to identify the most likely critical loads conditions, meaning that approximately ${10}^5$ simulations are required for conventional aircraft configurations. Furthermore these analyses have to be repeated every time that there is an update in the aircraft structure...

Compared to existing approaches for ROMs, our interest will be focused on two axis. On the one hand, we start from the consideration that small, highly non-linear scales are typically concentrated in limited spatial regions of the full simulation domain. So for example, in the flow past a wing, the highly non-linear phenomena take place close to the walls at the scale of a millimeter for computational domains that are of the order of hundreds of meters. In this context our approach is characterized by a multi-scale model where the large scales are described by far field models based on ROMs and the small scales are simulated by high-fidelity models. The whole point for this approach is to optimally decouple the far field from the near field.

A second characterizing feature of our ROM approach is non-linear interpolation. We start from the consideration that dynamical models derived from the projection of the PDE model in the reduced space are neither stable to numerical integration nor robust to parameter variation when hard non-linear multi-scale phenomena are considered.

However, thanks to Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) we can accurately approximate large solution databases using a small base. Recent techniques to investigate the temporal evolution of the POD modes (Koopman modes, Dynamic Mode Decomposition) allow a dynamic discrimination of the role played by each of them. This in turn can be exploited to interpolate between the modes in parameter space, thanks to ideas relying on optimal transportation that we have started developing in the FP7 project FFAST. In the following we precise these ideas on a specific example.