Interplay of Sensor Quantity, Placement and System Dimensionality on Energy Sparse Reconstruction of Fluid Flows

Abstract: Reconstruction of fine-scale information from sparse data is relevant to many practical fluid dynamic applications where the sensing is typically sparse. Fluid flows in an ideal sense are manifestations of nonlinear multiscale PDE dynamical systems with inherent scale separation that impact the system dimensionality. There is a common need to analyze the data from flow measurements or high-fidelity computations for stability characteristics, identification of coherent structures and develop evolutionary models for real-time data-driven control. Given that sparse reconstruction is inherently an ill-posed problem, the most successful approaches require the knowledge of the underlying basis space spanning the manifold in which the system resides. In this study, we employ an approach that learns basis from singular value decomposition (SVD) of training data to reconstruct sparsely sensed information at randomly sampled locations. This allows us to leverage energy sparsity with l2 minimization instead of the more expensive, sparsity promoting l1 minimization. Further, for unknown flow systems where only global operating parameters such as Reynolds (Re) number and raw data are available, it is often not clear what the optimal number of sensors and their placement for near-exact reconstruction needs to be. In this effort, we explore the interplay of data sparsity, sparsity of the underlying flow system and sensor placement on energy sparse reconstruction performance enabled by data- driven SVD basis. To this end, we investigate sparse convolution-based reconstruction performance by characterizing operational bounds for canonical laminar cylinder wake flows in both limit-cycle and transient regimes.