Data-driven stabilization of an oscillating flow with LTI controllers

Abstract: This paper presents advances towards the data-based control of periodic oscillator flows, from their fully-developed regime to their equilibrium stabilized in closed-loop, with linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers. The proposed approach directly builds upon Leclercq et al. (2019) and provides several improvements for an efficient online implementation, aimed at being applicable in experiments. First, we use input-output data to construct an LTI mean transfer functions of the flow. The model is subsequently used for the design of an LTI controller with Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) synthesis, that is practical to automate online. Then, using the controller in a feedback loop, the flow shifts in phase space and oscillations are damped. The procedure is repeated until equilibrium is reached, by stacking controllers and performing balanced truncation to deal with the increasing order of the compound controller. In this article, we illustrate the method on the classic flow past a cylinder at Reynolds number Re=100. Care has been taken such that the method may be fully automated and hopefully used as a valuable tool in a forthcoming experiment.