Input-output reduced-order modeling of unsteady flow over an airfoil at a high angle of attack based on dynamic mode decomposition with control

Abstract Due to the damage caused by stall flutter, the investigation and modeling of the flow over a wind turbine airfoil at high angles of attack are essential. Dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) and dynamic mode decomposition with control (DMDc) are used to analyze unsteady flow and identify the intrinsic dynamics. The DMDc algorithm is found to have an identification problem when the spatial dimension of the training data is larger than the number of snapshots. IDMDc, a variant algorithm based on reduced dimension data, is introduced to identify the precise intrinsic dynamics. DMD, DMDc and IDMDc are all used to decompose the data for unsteady flow over the S809 airfoil that are obtained by numerical simulations. The DMD results show that the dominant feature of a static airfoil is the adjacent shedding vortices in the wake. For an oscillating airfoil, the DMDc results may fail to consider the effect of the input and have an identification problem. IDMDc can alleviate this problem. The dominant IDMDc modes show that the intrinsic flow for the oscillating case is similar to the unsteady flow over the static airfoil. Moreover, the input–output model identified by IDMDc can give better predictions for different oscillating cases than the identified DMDc model.