The cross-spectral density (CSD) of the non-linear forcing in resolvent analyses is here quantified for the first time for turbulent channel flows. Direct numerical simulations (DNS) at $Re_τ =179$ and $Re_τ =543$ are performed. The CSDs are computed for highly energetic structures typical of buffer-layer and large-scale motions, for different temporal frequencies. The CSD of the non-linear forcing is shown not to be uncorrelated (white) in space, which implies the forcing is structured. Since the non-linear forcing is non-solenoidal by construction and the velocity of an incompressible flow is affected only by the solenoidal part of the forcing, this solenoidal part is evaluated. It is shown that the solenoidal part of the non-linear forcing is the combination of oblique streamwise vortices and a streamwise component which counteract each other, as in a destructive interference. It is shown that a rank-2 approximation of the forcing, with only the most energetic SPOD (spectral proper orthogonal decomposition) modes, leads to the bulk of the response. The projections of the non-linear forcing onto the right-singular vectors of the resolvent are evaluated. The left-singular vectors of the resolvent associated with very low-magnitude singular values are non-negligible since the non-linear forcing term has a non-negligible projection onto the linear sub-optimals of resolvent analysis. The same projections are computed when the forcing is modelled with an eddy-viscosity approach. It is clarified that this modelling improves the accuracy of the prediction since the projections are closer to those associated with the non-linear forcing from DNS data.
The resolvent analysis of McKeon & Sharma (2010) recasts the Navier-Stokes equations into an input/output form in which the nonlinear term is treated as a forcing that acts upon the linear dynamics to yield a velocity response. The framework has shown promise with regards to producing low-dimensional representations of exact coherent states. Previous work has focused on a primitive variable output; here we show a velocity-vorticity formulation of the governing equations along with a Helmholtz decomposition of the nonlinear forcing term reveals a simplified input/output form in the resolvent an…
An analysis of the statistics of the non-linear terms in resolvent analysis is performed in this work for turbulent Couette flow at low Reynolds number. Data from a direct numerical simulation of a minimal flow unit, at Reynolds number 400, is post-processed using Fourier analysis in both time and space, leading to the covariance matrix of the velocity. From the same data, we computed the non-linear terms of the Navier-Stokes equations (treated as forcing in the present formulation), which allowed us to compute the covariance matrix of the forcing for this case. The two covariances are related…
This investigation aims to assess the effect of different types of actuator forcing on the feedback loop of an under-expanded Mach 1.27 planar impinging jet using a resolvent framework. To this end, we employ a Large Eddy Simulation database as a truth model. The time and spanwise-averaged mean flow is taken as an input to global stability and resolvent analyses with the purpose of examining both the intrinsic instability and input-output characteristics. The results show that the inherent instability and primary energy amplification are attributed to the Kelvin-Helmholtz (K-H) instability. Mo…
We employ a resolvent-based methodology to estimate velocity and pressure fluctuations within turbulent channel flows at friction Reynolds numbers of approximately 180, 550 and 1000 using measurements of shear stress and pressure at the walls, taken from direct numerical simulation (DNS) databases. Martini et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 900, 2021, A2) showed that the resolvent-based estimator is optimal when the true space-time forcing statistics are utilized, thus providing an upper bound for the accuracy of any linear estimator. We use this framework to determine the flow structures that can b…
Coupled thermoacoustic resolvent analysis of a model two-stream coaxial combustor
State Key Laboratory of Nonlinear Mechanics, Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院力学研究所非线性力学国家重点实验室）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学机械工程系）；School of Engineering Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学工程科学学院）
Recent simulations indicate that streamwise-preferential porous materials have the potential to reduce drag in wall-bounded turbulent flows(Gomez-de-Segura & Garcia-Mayoral 2019). This paper extends the resolvent formulation to study the effect of such anisotropic permeable substrates on turbulent channel flow. Under the resolvent formulation, the Fourier-transformed Navier-Stokes equations are interpreted as a linear forcing-response system. The nonlinear terms are considered the endogenous forcing in the system that gives rise to a velocity and pressure response. A gain-based decomposition o…
Self-similarity of wall-attached coherent structures in a turbulent channel at $Re_τ=543$ is explored by means of resolvent analysis. In this modelling framework, coherent structures are understood to arise as a response of the linearised mean-flow operator to generalised, frequency-dependent Reynolds stresses, considered to act as an endogenous forcing. We assess the self-similarity of both the wall-attached flow structures and the associated forcing. The former are educed from direct numerical simulation data by finding the flow field correlated with the wall shear, whereas the latter is ide…
The present work demonstrates the use of resolvent analysis to obtain physical insights for open-cavity flows. Resolvent analysis identifies the flow response to harmonic forcing, given a steady base state, in terms of the response and forcing modes and the amplification gain. The response and forcing modes reveal the spatial structures associated with this amplification process. In this study, we perform resolvent analysis on both laminar and turbulent flows over a rectangular cavity with length-to-depth ratio of $L/D=6$ at a free stream Mach number of $M_\infty=0.6$ in a spanwise periodic se…
Coherent turbulent wave-packet structures in a jet at Reynolds number 460000 and Mach number 0.4 are extracted from experimental measurements and are modeled as linear fluctuations around the mean flow. The linear model is based on harmonic optimal forcing structures and their associated flow response at individual Strouhal numbers, obtained from analysis of the global linear resolvent operator. These forcing-response wave packets ("resolvent modes") are first discussed with regard to relevant physical mechanisms that provide energy gain of flow perturbations in the jet. Modal shear instabilit…
The decomposition of hydrodynamic and acoustic components of cavity flows can aid the understanding of the flow-acoustic interaction, which produces a variety of adverse effects in applications. We apply the approach of combining the resolvent analysis and Doak's momentum potential theory to examine the input-output flow-acoustic characteristics of compressible flow over an open cavity at Re=10,000. The methodology can decompose hydrodynamic and acoustic components from an input-output framework. We further localize the forcing at the leading-edge and front wall of the cavity and filter with a…
We use resolvent analysis to determine an unsteady active control setup to attenuate pressure fluctuations in turbulent supersonic flow over a rectangular cavity with a length-to-depth ratio of 6 at a Mach number of 1.4 and a Reynolds number based on cavity depth of 10,000. Large-eddy simulations (LES) and dynamic modal decomposition (DMD) of the supersonic cavity flow reveal the dominance of two-dimensional Rossiter modes II and IV. These predominantly two-dimensional vortical structures generate high-amplitude unsteadiness over the cavity through trailing-edge impingement and create oblique …
During the last decade, forcing and response modes produced by resolvent analysis have demonstrated great potential to guide sensor and actuator placement and design in flow control applications. However, resolvent modes are frequency-dependent, which, although responsible for their success in identifying scale interactions in turbulence, complicates their use for control purposes. In this work, we seek orthogonal bases of forcing and response modes that are the most responsive and receptive, respectively, across all frequencies. We show that these frequency-independent bases of \emph{represen…
We seek to quantify non-normality of the most amplified resolvent modes and predict their features based on the characteristics of the base or mean velocity profile. A 2-by-2 model linear Navier-Stokes (LNS) operator illustrates how non-normality from mean shear distributes perturbation energy in different velocity components of the forcing and response modes. The inverse of their inner product, which is unity for a purely normal mechanism, is proposed as a measure to quantify non-normality. In flows where there is downstream spatial dependence of the base/mean, mean flow advection separates t…
We use the feedback loop of McKeon \& Sharma (2010), where the nonlinear term in the Navier-Stokes equations is treated as an intrinsic forcing of the linear resolvent operator, to educe the structure of fluctuations in the range of scales (wavenumbers) where linear mechanisms are not active. In this region, the absence of dominant linear mechanisms is reflected in the lack of low-rank characteristics of the resolvent and in the disagreement between the structure of resolvent modes and actual flow features. To demonstrate the procedure, we choose low Reynolds number cylinder flow and the Couet…
This paper extends the resolvent formalism for wall turbulence proposed by McKeon and Sharma(2010) to account for the effect of streamwise-constant riblets. Under the resolvent formulation, the Navier-Stokes equations are interpreted as a forcing-response system: the nonlinear convective term is interpreted as a feedback forcing on the remaining linear terms, which generates a velocity and pressure response. A gain-based decomposition of the linear forcing-response transfer function --- the resolvent operator --- yields highly amplified velocity and pressure modes, which can be considered key …
The flows around a NACA 0018 airfoil at a Reynolds number of 10250 and angles of attack of alpha = 0 (A0) and alpha = 10 (A10) are modelled using resolvent analysis and limited experimental measurements obtained from particle image velocimetry. The experimental mean velocity profiles are data-assimilated so that they are solutions of the incompressible Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations forced by Reynolds stress terms which are derived from experimental data. Spectral proper orthogonal decompositions (SPOD) of the velocity fluctuations and nonlinear forcing find low-rank behaviour at th…
We perform resolvent analysis to examine the perturbation dynamics over the laminar separation bubble (LSB) that forms near the leading edge of a NACA 0012 airfoil at a chord-based Reynolds number of 500,000 and an angle of attack of 8 degrees. Randomized SVD is adopted in the present analysis to relieve the computational cost associated with the high-Re global base flow. To examine the local physics over the LSB, we consider the use of exponential discounting to limit the time horizon that allows for the instability to develop with respect to the base flow. With discounting, the gain distribu…
Resolvent analysis is performed to identify the origin of two-dimensional transonic buffet over an airfoil. The base flow for the resolvent analysis is the time-averaged flow over a NACA 0012 airfoil at a chord-based Reynolds number of 2000 and a free-stream Mach number of 0.85. We reveal that the mechanism of buffet is buried underneath the global low-Reynolds-number flow physics. At this low Reynolds number, the dominant flow feature is the von Karman shedding. However, we show that with the appropriate forcing input, buffet can appear even at a Reynolds number that is much lower than what i…
This work applies resolvent analysis to incompressible flow through a rectangular duct, in order to identify dominant linear energy-amplification mechanisms present in such flows. In particular, we formulate the resolvent operator from linearizing the Navier--Stokes equations about a two-dimensional base/mean flow. The laminar base flow only has a nonzero streamwise velocity component, while the turbulent case exhibits a secondary mean flow (Prandtl's secondary flow of the second kind). A singular value decomposition of the resolvent operator allows for the identification of structures corresp…
The application of control tools to complex flows frequently requires approximations, such as reduced-order models and/or simplified forcing assumptions, where these may be considered low-rank or defined in terms of simplified statistics (e.g. white noise). In this work, we propose a resolvent-based control methodology with causality imposed via a Wiener-Hopf formalism. Linear optimal causal estimation and control laws are obtained directly from full-rank, globally stable systems with arbitrary disturbance statistics, circumventing many drawbacks of alternative methods. We use efficient, matri…
The conceptual picture underlying resolvent analysis(RA) is that the nonlinear term in the Navier-Stokes(NS) equations provides an intrinsic forcing to the linear dynamics, a description inspired by control theory. The inverse of the linear operator, defined as the resolvent, is interpreted as a transfer function between the forcing and the velocity response. This inversion obscures the physical interpretation of the governing equations and is prohibitive to analytical manipulation, and for large systems leads to significant computational cost and memory requirements. In this work we suggest a…
Performing global resolvent analysis for high-Reynolds-number turbulent flow calls for the handling of a large discrete operator. Even though such large operator is required in the analysis, most applications of resolvent analysis extracts only a few dominant resolvent response and forcing modes. Here, we consider the use of randomized numerical linear algebra to reduce the dimension of the resolvent operator for achieving computational speed up and memory saving compared to the standard resolvent analysis. To accomplish this goal, we utilize sketching of the linear operator with random test m…
Resolvent analysis is a powerful tool for modeling and analyzing turbulent flows and in particular provides an approximation of coherent flow structures. Despite recent algorithmic advances, computing resolvent modes for flows with more than one inhomogeneous spatial coordinate remains computationally expensive. In this two-part paper, we show how efficient and accurate approximations of resolvent modes can be obtained using a well-posed spatial marching method for flows that contain a slowly varying direction. In this first part of the paper, we derive a well-posed and convergent one-way equa…
Resolvent analysis identifies the most responsive forcings and most receptive states of a dynamical system, in an input--output sense, based on its governing equations. Interest in the method has continued to grow during the past decade due to its potential to reveal structures in turbulent flows, to guide sensor/actuator placement, and for flow control applications. However, resolvent analysis requires access to high-fidelity numerical solvers to produce the linearized dynamics operator. In this work, we develop a purely data-driven algorithm to perform resolvent analysis to obtain the leadin…
The ability of linear stochastic response analysis to estimate coherent motions is investigated in turbulent channel flow at friction Reynolds number Re$_τ$ = 1007. The analysis is performed for spatial scales characteristic of buffer-layer and large-scale motions by separating the contributions of different temporal frequencies. Good agreement between the measured spatio-temporal power spectral densities and those estimated by means of the resolvent is found when the effect of turbulent Reynolds stresses, modelled with an eddy-viscosity associated to the turbulent mean flow, is included in th…
We present an optimization-based method to efficiently calculate accurate nonlinear models of Taylor vortex flow. We use the resolvent formulation of McKeon & Sharma (2010) to model these Taylor vortex solutions by treating the nonlinearity not as an inherent part of the governing equations but rather as a triadic constraint which must be satisfied by the model solution. We exploit the low rank linear dynamics of the system to calculate an efficient basis for our solution, the coefficients of which are then calculated through an optimization problem where the cost function to be minimized is t…
We develop a method to estimate space-time flow statistics from a limited set of known data. While previous work has focused on modeling spatial or temporal statistics independently, space-time statistics carry fundamental information about the physics and coherent motions of the flow and provide a starting point for low-order modeling and flow control efforts. The method is derived using a statistical interpretation of resolvent analysis. The central idea of our approach is to use known data to infer the statistics of the nonlinear terms that constitute a forcing on the linearized Navier-Stok…
We report that many exact invariant solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations for both pipe and channel flows are well represented by just few modes of the model of McKeon & Sharma J. Fl. Mech. 658, 356 (2010). This model provides modes that act as a basis to decompose the velocity field, ordered by their amplitude of response to forcing arising from the interaction between scales. The model was originally derived from the Navier-Stokes equations to represent turbulent flows and has been used to explain coherent structure and to predict turbulent statistics. This establishes a surprising new li…
This work introduces a variant of resolvent analysis that identifies forcing and response modes that are sparse in both space and time. This is achieved through the use of a sparse principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm, which formulates the associated optimization problem as a nonlinear eigenproblem that can be solved with an inverse power method. We apply this method to parallel shear flows, both in the case where we assume Fourier modes in time (as in standard resolvent analysis) and obtain spatial localization, and where we allow for temporally-sparse modes through the use of a linea…
Resolvent analysis of the linearized Navier-Stokes equations provides useful insight into the dynamics of transitional and turbulent flows and can provide a model for the dominant coherent structures within the flow, particularly for flows with large gain separation. Direct computation of force and response modes using a singular value decomposition of the full resolvent matrix is feasible only for simple problems; despite recent progress, the cost of resolvent analysis for complex flows remains considerable. In this paper, we propose a new matrix-free method for computing resolvent modes base…
Response modes computed via linear resolvent analysis of a turbulent mean-flow field have been shown to qualitatively capture characteristics of the observed turbulent coherent structures in both wall-bounded and free shear flows. To make such resolvent models predictive, the nonlinear forcing term must be closed. Strategies to do so include imposing self-consistent sets of triadic interactions, proposing various source models, or through turbulence modelling. For the latter, several investigators have proposed using the mean-field eddy viscosity acting linearly on the fluctuation field. In th…
We study the Reynolds number scaling and the geometric self-similarity of a gain-based, low-rank approximation to turbulent channel flows, determined by the resolvent formulation of McKeon & Sharma (2010), in order to obtain a description of the streamwise turbulence intensity from direct consideration of the Navier-Stokes equations. Under this formulation, the velocity field is decomposed into propagating waves (with single streamwise and spanwise wavelengths and wave speed) whose wall-normal shapes are determined from the principal singular function of the corresponding resolvent operator. U…
Linearisation of the Navier-Stokes equations about the mean of a turbulent flow forms the foundation of popular models for energy amplification and coherent structures, including resolvent analysis. While the Navier-Stokes equations can be equivalently written using many different sets of dependent variables, we show that the properties of the linear operator obtained via linearisation about the mean depend on the variables in which the equations are written prior to linearisation. For example, we show that using primitive and conservative variables leads to differences in the singular values …
