Control of Navier-Stokes equations by means of mode reduction

Abstract

In a previous work (Park HM, Lee MW. An efficient method of solving the Navier–Stokes equation for the flow control. International Journal of Numerical Methods in Engineering 1998; 41: 1131–1151), the authors proposed an efficient method of solving the Navier–Stokes equations by reducing their number of modes. Employing the empirical eigenfunctions of the Karhunen–Loève decomposition as basis functions of a Galerkin procedure, one can a priori limit the function space considered to the smallest linear sub-space that is sufficient to describe the observed phenomena, and consequently, reduce the Navier–Stokes equations defined on a complicated geometry to a set of ordinary differential equations with a minimum degree of freedom. In the present work, we apply this technique, termed the Karhunen–Loève Galerkin procedure, to a pointwise control problem of Navier–Stokes equations. The Karhunen–Loève Galerkin procedure is found to be much more efficient than the traditional method, such as finite difference method in obtaining optimal control profiles when the minimization of the objective function has been done by using a conjugate gradient method.