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Fluid flows play a central role in scientific and technological development, and many of these flows are characterized by a dominant oscillation, such as the vortex shedding in the wake of nearly all transportation vehicles. The ability to…
Optimal control of switched systems is challenging due to the discrete nature of the switching control input. The embedding-based approach addresses this challenge by solving a corresponding relaxed optimal control problem with only…
A central problem of turbulence theory is to produce a predictive model for turbulent fluxes. These have profound implications for virtually all aspects of the turbulence dynamics. In magnetic confinement devices, drift-wave turbulence…
We study 3D chaotic dynamics through an analysis of transport in a granular flow in a half-full spherical tumbler rotated sequentially about two orthogonal axes (a bi-axial "blinking" tumbler). The flow is essentially quasi-2D in any…
We present an exploration of the rich theoretical connections between several classes of regularized models, network flows, and recent results in submodular function theory. This work unifies key aspects of these problems under a common…
The problem of resource allocation of nonlinear networked control systems is investigated, where, unlike the well discussed case of triggering for stability, the objective is optimal triggering. An approximate dynamic programming approach…
Following [21, 23], the present work investigates a new relative entropy-regularized algorithm for solving the optimal transport on a graph problem within the randomized shortest paths formalism. More precisely, a unit flow is injected into…
This study examines the relaminarization of turbulent puffs in pipe flow using highly resolved direct numerical simulations at Reynolds numbers of 1880, 1900, and 1920. The exponential decay of the total energy of streamwise velocity…
Control of complex turbulent dynamical systems involving strong nonlinearity and high degrees of internal instability is an important topic in practice. Different from traditional methods for controlling individual trajectories, controlling…
The effects of global flow rotation and curvature on the subcritical transition to turbulence in shear flows are examined. The relevant time-scales of the problem are identified by a decomposition of the flow into a laminar and a deviation…
In this paper, we use tools from sheaf theory to model and analyze optimal network control problems and their associated discrete relaxations. We consider a general problem setting in which pieces of equipment and their causal relations are…
Optimal control theory deals with finding protocols to steer a system between assigned initial and final states, such that a trajectory-dependent cost function is minimized. The application of optimal control to stochastic systems is an…
The design of fluid channel structures of reactors or separators of chemical processes is key to enhancing the mass transfer processes inside the devices. However, the systematic design of channel topological structures is difficult for…
We investigate the energy transfer from the mean profile to velocity fluctuations in channel flow by calculating nonlinear optimal disturbances,i.e. the initial condition of a given finite energy that achieves the highest possible energy…
This paper introduces a novel approach to system identification for nonlinear input-output models that minimizes the simulation error and frames the problem as a constrained optimization task. The proposed method addresses vanishing…
Strong $E\times B$ plasma flow shear is beneficial for reducing turbulent transport. However, traditional methods of driving flow shear do not scale well to large devices such as future fusion power plants. In this paper, we use a large…
Dynamic and evolving operational and economic environments present significant challenges for decision-making. We explore a simulation optimization problem characterized by non-stationary input distributions with regime-switching dynamics…
A central obstacle to understanding the route to turbulence in wall-bounded flows is that the flows are composed of complex, highly fluctuating, and strongly nonlinear states. In the case of pipe flow, models have deepened our understanding…
Relaminarization of wall-bounded turbulent flows by means of external static magnetic fields is a long-known phenomenon in the physics of electrically conducting fluids at low magnetic Reynolds numbers. Despite the large literature on the…
Continuous control over azimuthal flow and shear in the edge of the Large Plasma Device (LAPD) has been achieved using a biasable limiter which has allowed a careful study of the effect of flow shear on pressure-gradient-driven turbulence…