No Arabic abstract
The impact of boat traffic on the health of coastal ecosystems is a multi-scale process: from minutes (individual wakes) to days (tidal modulation of sediment transport), to seasons and years (traffic is seasonal). A considerable numerical effort, notwithstanding the value of a boat-by-boat numerical modeling approach, is questionable, because of the practical impossibility of specifying the exact type and navigation characteristics for every boat comprising the traffic at any given time. Here, we propose a statistical-mechanics description of the traffic using a joint probability density of the wake population in some characteristic parameter space. We attempt to answer two basic questions: (1) what is the relevant parameter space and (2) how should a numerical model be tested for a wake population? We describe the linear and nonlinear characteristics of wakes observed in the Florida Intracoastal Waters. Adopting provisionally a two-dimensional parameter space (depth- and length-based Froude numbers) we conduct numerical simulations using the open-source FUNWAVE-TVD Boussinesq model. The model performance is excellent for weakly-dispersive, completely specified wakes (e.g., the analytical linear wakes), and also for the range of Froude numbers observed in the field, or for large container ships generating relatively long waves. The model is challenged by the short waves generated by small, slow boats. However, simulations suggest that the problem is confined to the deeper water domain and linear evolution. Nonlinear wake shoaling, essential for modeling wake-induced sediment transport and wake impact on the environment, is described well.
Different definitions of links in climate networks may lead to considerably different network topologies. We construct a network from climate records of surface level atmospheric temperature in different geographical sites around the globe using two commonly used definitions of links. Utilizing detrended fluctuation analysis, shuffled surrogates and separation analysis of maritime and continental records, we find that one of the major influences on the structure of climate networks is due to the auto-correlation in the records, that may introduce spurious links. This may explain why different methods could lead to different climate network topologies.
Predicting and simulating aerodynamic fields for civil aircraft over wide flight envelopes represent a real challenge mainly due to significant numerical costs and complex flows. Surrogate models and reduced-order models help to estimate aerodynamic fields from a few well-selected simulations. However, their accuracy dramatically decreases when different physical regimes are involved. Therefore, a method of local non-intrusive reduced-order models using machine learning, called Local Decomposition Method, has been developed to mitigate this issue. This paper introduces several enhancements to this method and presents a complex application to an industrial-like three-dimensional aircraft configuration over a full flight envelope. The enhancements of the method cover several aspects: choosing the best number of models, estimating apriori errors, improving the adaptive sampling for parallel issues, and better handling the borders between local models. The application is supported by an analysis of the model behavior, with a focus on the machine learning methods and the local properties. The model achieves strong levels of accuracy, in particular with two sub-models: one for the subsonic regime and one for the transonic regime. These results highlight that local models and machine learning represent very promising solutions to deal with surrogate models for aerodynamics.
Problems associated with the Boltzmann collisional operator are unveiled and discussed. By careful investigation it is shown that collective effects of molecular collisions in the six-dimensional position and velocity space are more sophisticated than they appear to be.
We apply a new threshold detection method based on the extreme value theory to the von Karman sodium (VKS) experiment data. The VKS experiment is a successful attempt to get a dynamo magnetic field in a laboratory liquid-metal experiment. We first show that the dynamo threshold is associated to a change of the probability density function of the extreme values of the magnetic field. This method does not require the measurement of response functions from applied external perturbations, and thus provides a simple threshold estimate. We apply our method to different configurations in the VKS experiment showing that it yields a robust indication of the dynamo threshold as well as evidence of hysteretic behaviors. Moreover, for the experimental configurations in which a dynamo transition is not observed, the method provides a way to extrapolate an interval of possible threshold values.
Wind farm design primarily depends on the variability of the wind turbine wake flows to the atmospheric wind conditions, and the interaction between wakes. Physics-based models that capture the wake flow-field with high-fidelity are computationally very expensive to perform layout optimization of wind farms, and, thus, data-driven reduced order models can represent an efficient alternative for simulating wind farms. In this work, we use real-world light detection and ranging (LiDAR) measurements of wind-turbine wakes to construct predictive surrogate models using machine learning. Specifically, we first demonstrate the use of deep autoencoders to find a low-dimensional emph{latent} space that gives a computationally tractable approximation of the wake LiDAR measurements. Then, we learn the mapping between the parameter space and the (latent space) wake flow-fields using a deep neural network. Additionally, we also demonstrate the use of a probabilistic machine learning technique, namely, Gaussian process modeling, to learn the parameter-space-latent-space mapping in addition to the epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty in the data. Finally, to cope with training large datasets, we demonstrate the use of variational Gaussian process models that provide a tractable alternative to the conventional Gaussian process models for large datasets. Furthermore, we introduce the use of active learning to adaptively build and improve a conventional Gaussian process model predictive capability. Overall, we find that our approach provides accurate approximations of the wind-turbine wake flow field that can be queried at an orders-of-magnitude cheaper cost than those generated with high-fidelity physics-based simulations.