Proper orthogonal decomposition extensions and their applications in steady aerodynamics

Abstract

The development and application of model reduction techniques have been widely investigated for problems in unsteady aerodynamic systems, driven mainly by the need to develop effective economical computational models capturing as much flow physics as possible. These techniques which have been based on a number of approaches such as balanced truncation, Arnoldi, proper orthogonal decomposition etc are designed to obtain a reduced-order model for both linear and nonlinear systems. However there has been a paucity in the application of these techniques in the area of steady aerodynamics. The work reported in this thesis demonstrates how the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) technique can be extended to a number of applications in steady aerodynamics.