MMAE Seminar - Gradient-based Fluid Dynamics: from Simulation to Control and Design - Midwest Mechanics Series

Time

-

Locations

10 W. 32nd Street, Engineering 1 Building, Crawford Auditorium, Room 104

Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Professor Peter Schmid, Imperial College, London, to campus on Wednesday, April 1st, to present his Gradient-based Fluid Dynamics: from Simulation to Control and Design lecture.

Abstract

With the increasing complexity and scale of numerical simulations of fluid flows, the problems we pursue and questions we ask become commensurably complicated. In the past, numerical simulations have produced high-fidelity output to user-specified input. More recently, the inverse problem has been tackled: given a user-specified objective, we desire control strategies, design modifications, or other manipulative measures to achieve this goal with minimal effort. Questions of this type require gradient or sensitivity information about the flow, which can be gained by formulating adjoint algorithms, equations, or variables. We will introduce a general gradient-based framework for the analysis of compressible and incompressible fluid systems based on chained sparse matrix products (and their adjoints) and demonstrate the potential of this approach on two applications: (i) the analysis and control of tonal noise around an airfoil and (ii) the optimization of mixing by a blowing-and-suction strategy. Various extensions of this framework to related application areas will also be discussed.

Biography

After completing his undergraduate and graduate studies in Aerospace Engineering at the Technical University of Munich, Dr. Schmid completed his doctorate in Mathematics at MIT. He joined the Department of Applied Mathematics faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he remained until 2005. He then took the position of research director at the French National Research Agency (CNRS) and a faculty position at the Department of Mechanics of the Ecole Polytechnique near Paris. In 2013, he moved to his current Chair of Applied Mathematics position at Imperial College London. His research interests center on hydrodynamic instabilities, flow control, model reduction and optimization, and quantitative flow analysis techniques.