Extracting informative vortical structures of turbulent wake-extreme vortex gust interactions with machine learning

This study considers extracting causally important vortical structures from the extreme vortex gust-airfoil interaction at a chord-based Reynolds number of $5000$. This extraction is achieved by decomposing a given vortical flow snapshot into its informative and residual components based on the contribution to an arbitrary future target variable with convolutional information-theoretic learning. For the current vortex-airfoil interactions that exhibit transient and multiscale flow characteristics, we first examine the important vortical structures with respect to a future lift coefficient. While the vortex cores are primarily highlighted before vortex impingement, the emerging shear layers are additionally captured after the massive separation, which is evident from a comparison to an instantaneous force-element analysis. We further take the scale-dependent energy transfer as a future variable of interest to examine its impact on the extracted informative structures compared to the lift-associated structures. They are distinct from the lift-based structures in the early stage of the gust encounter yet become similar after impingement, revealing an analogy between informative structures across different transient aerodynamic mechanisms. The present data-driven approach selectively extracts the specific important flow structures responsible for the physics of interest, which can support studying a range of transient aerodynamic flows from the causal, data-driven perspective.