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AEM Seminar: Tackling the Complex Dynamics of Unsteady Flows

Kunihiko Taira, Associate Professor Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, UCLA

2:30 PM on 2019-04-19

3-230 Keller Hall


Abstract:

Controlling the behavior of flows around air, marine, and ground vehicles can greatly enhance their performance, efficiency, and safety. The challenge in achieving effective control of unsteady flows is caused by their high-dimensionality, strong nonlinearity, and multi-scale properties. Without the reduction of the state variable dimension and extraction of important dynamics, the application of dynamical systems and control theory for flow control becomes a challenging 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 in full DNS and LES computations for validations.

Bio:

Kunihiko (Sam) Taira is an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCLA. His research focuses on computational fluid dynamics, flow control, and network science. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Tennessee, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology. Prior to his current position, has a faculty member at the Florida State University. He is a recipient of the 2013 U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and 2016 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Awards.


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