Low rank approximation techniques and reduced order modeling applied to some fluid dynamics problems

Numerical simulation has experienced tremendous improvements in the last decadesdriven by massive growth of computing power. Exascale computing has beenachieved this year and will allow solving ever more complex problems. But suchlarge systems produce colossal amounts of data which leads to its own difficulties.Moreover, many engineering problems such as multiphysics or optimisation andcontrol, require far more power that any computer architecture could achievewithin the current scientific computing paradigm. In this thesis, we proposeto shift the paradigm in order to break the curse of dimensionality byintroducing decomposition and building reduced order models (ROM) for complexfluid flows.This manuscript is organized into two parts. The first one proposes an extendedreview of data reduction techniques and intends to bridge between appliedmathematics community and the computational mechanics one. Thus, foundingbivariate separation is studied, including discussions on the equivalence ofproper orthogonal decomposition (POD, continuous framework) and singular valuedecomposition (SVD, discrete matrices). Then a wide review of tensor formats andtheir approximation is proposed. Such work has already been provided in theliterature but either on separate papers or into a purely applied mathematicsframework. Here, we offer to the data enthusiast scientist a comparison ofCanonical, Tucker, Hierarchical and Tensor train formats including theirapproximation algorithms. Their relative benefits are studied both theoreticallyand numerically thanks to the python library texttt{pydecomp} that wasdeveloped during this thesis. A careful analysis of the link between continuousand discrete methods is performed. Finally, we conclude that for mostapplications ST-HOSVD is best when the number of dimensions $d$ lower than fourand TT-SVD (or their POD equivalent) when $d$ grows larger.The second part is centered on a complex fluid dynamics flow, in particular thesingular lid driven cavity at high Reynolds number. This flow exhibits a seriesof Hopf bifurcation which are known to be hard to capture accurately which iswhy a detailed analysis was performed both with classical tools and POD. Oncethis flow has been characterized, emph{time-scaling}, a new ``physics based''interpolation ROM is presented on internal and external flows. This methodsgives encouraging results while excluding recent advanced developments in thearea such as EIM or Grassmann manifold interpolation.