arXiv subjects

Boris Kramer

Publications and source records attributed to Boris Kramer.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Stochastic Operator Inference for reduced-order modeling of capillary wave turbulence using experimental measurements

Modeling complex physical phenomena directly from experimental data poses fundamental challenges: measurement devices introduce noise and biases into the data, the governing equations are often unknown or intractable, and the dynamics observed experimentally may exhibit stochastic behavior. In this paper, we consider capillary wave turbulence---an example of nonlinear wave interactions at a microfluidic interface---measured by ultra-high-speed digital holographic microscopy. With the goal to learn an efficient model directly from these data, we adapt a stochastic extension of Operator Inference to learn low-dimensional stochastic differential equation representations of the microscale wave dynamics from experimental measurements. Each experiment is repeated 16 times, and 10 different conditions are created by changing the nondimensional acoustic capillary number through an excitation device. In addition, we propose a new strategy to select the reduced-order model dimension, based on both mean and covariance errors. We further add Tikhonov regularization to the stochastic Operator Inference framework and show that, beyond its conventional role as a numerical stabilization technique in deterministic settings, it has a physically meaningful interpretation as controlling the spectral content of the learned stochastic dynamics. We demonstrate that the resulting stochastic reduced-order models faithfully capture salient physical features of capillary wave turbulence across a range of experimental conditions.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2026

Uncertainty quantification of fatigue initiation life for powder bed fusion metal additive manufacturing

Predicting fatigue life with quantified uncertainties is essential for the qualification of critical components produced by laser-based powder bed fusion additive manufacturing. We present a framework that propagates microstructure and defect uncertainties directly to a fatigue initiation life distribution for a specific part. In particular, microstructure and defect characterizations are obtained from electron backscatter diffraction and micro-computed tomography scan data, which in turn inform three physics-based simulations yielding the fatigue-affecting quantities: the elastic energy release rate, the surface energy along the crack path, and the fatigue indicator parameter. Accounting for the uncertainties in these quantities and the high correlations among them due to the shared underlying microstructure, we derive a closed-form probability density function for the fatigue initiation life. This provides an analytical distribution instead of conservative deterministic predictions and enables more informed decision making for the qualification and deployment of additively manufactured components. Applying the framework to 316L stainless steel parts produced by an EOS M290 laser powder bed fusion machine, we find that both grain sizes and void distributions influence the fatigue initiation life distribution. Specifically, for a fixed total void volume fraction, larger grain sizes cause a marginal reduction in fatigue initiation life, and a population of many small voids is more favorable for fatigue life than fewer, larger voids of equivalent total volume.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2026

Reachability-Based Design Optimization for Aircraft Maneuverability

This paper presents a method for incorporating control analysis into design optimization for highly-maneuverable aircraft. By studying reachable sets for aircraft dynamics, we ensure that the optimizer will take the aircraft's controlled capabilities into account. We compute reachable sets of linear dynamics for computational efficiency, and account for aircraft trim points to factor in asymmetric magnitude bounds on the input signals. We demonstrate the proposed method in design optimization of a blended-wing-body aircraft. Considering its wing half-span and center half-span as design variables, we optimize the aircraft based on its longitudinal dynamics' reachable sets to yield improvements in its controlled performance. When designing a reference tracking controller, we find up to 30\% less tracking error for angle of attack of the optimized model's nonlinear dynamics.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Nonlinear balanced truncation model reduction through scalable Taylor series

The theory of nonlinear balanced truncation provides a system-theoretic framework for model reduction that preserves important properties such as stability, controllability, and observability. We present a scalable algorithm for computing reduced-order models based on the nonlinear balancing theory. The approach is based on polynomial approximations using the Kronecker product representation, building on recent numerical linear algebra advancements to enable scalability. We derive polynomial approximations for the balancing transformation and the explicit balanced realization of the full-order model, which yields true nonlinear reduced-order models upon truncation of redundant state components. The proposed tools are tested on various examples, demonstrating a nuanced perspective of the benefits and limitations of nonlinear balancing not shown in the existing literature.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Reachability Analysis for Design Optimization

We present an approach to approximate reachable sets for linear systems with bounded L-infinity controls in finite time. Our first approach investigates the boundaries of these sets and reveals an exact characterization for single-input, planar systems with real, distinct eigenvalues. The second approach leverages convergence of the Lp-norms to L-infinity and uses Lp-norm reachable sets as an approximation of the L-infinity-norm reachable sets. Our optimal control results yield insights that make computational approximations of the Lp-norm reachable sets more tractable, and yield exact characterizations for L-infinity with the previous assumptions on the system. As an example, we incorporate our reachability analysis into the design optimization of a highly-maneuverable aircraft. Introducing constraints based on reachability allow us to factor physical limitations to desired flight maneuvers into the design process.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Quadratization of Autonomous Partial Differential Equations: Algorithmic Solutions

Quadratization for partial differential equations (PDEs) is a process that formally transforms a PDE with a nonquadratic right-hand side into a quadratic form by introducing auxiliary variables. Even though the existence and uniqueness of the solution of this quadratic form are, as of yet, unknown in the general case, this symbolic transformation has been used in diverse fields to simplify the analysis, simulation, and control of PDE models. This paper presents a rigorous definition of PDE quadratization, a sample case study on the solutions of quadratic representations, and theoretical contributions for the PDE quadratization problem of spatially one-dimensional PDEs, including results on existence and complexity. Its main focus, however, is introducing and analyzing QuPDE, an algorithm based on symbolic computation and discrete optimization that outputs a quadratization for any spatially one-dimensional polynomial or rational PDE. This algorithm is the first computational tool to find quadratizations for PDEs to date. We demonstrate QuPDE's performance by applying it to fourteen nonquadratic PDEs in diverse areas such as fluid mechanics, space physics, chemical engineering, and biological processes. QuPDE delivers a low-order quadratization in each case, uncovering quadratic transformations with fewer auxiliary variables than those previously discovered in the literature for some examples, and finding quadratizations for systems that had not been transformed to quadratic form before.

cs.SC↗

arXiv2025

Dynamic Shape Control of Soft Robots Enabled by Data-Driven Model Reduction

Soft robots have shown immense promise in settings where they can leverage dynamic control of their entire bodies. However, effective dynamic shape control requires a controller that accounts for the robot's high-dimensional dynamics--a challenge exacerbated by a lack of general-purpose tools for modeling soft robots amenably for control. In this work, we conduct a comparative study of data-driven model reduction techniques for generating linear models amendable to dynamic shape control. We focus on three methods--the eigensystem realization algorithm, dynamic mode decomposition with control, and the Lagrangian operator inference (LOpInf) method. Using each class of model, we explored their efficacy in model predictive control policies for the dynamic shape control of a simulated eel-inspired soft robot in three experiments: 1) tracking simulated reference trajectories guaranteed to be feasible, 2) tracking reference trajectories generated from a biological model of eel kinematics, and 3) tracking reference trajectories generated by a reduced-scale physical analog. In all experiments, the LOpInf-based policies generated lower tracking errors than policies based on other models.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Weighted Proper Orthogonal Decomposition for High-Dimensional Optimization

While proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) is widely used for model reduction, its standard form does not take into account any parametric model structure. Extensions to POD have been proposed to address this, but these either require large amounts of solution data, lack online adaptivity, or have limited approximation accuracy. We circumvent these limitations by instead assigning weights to the snapshot matrix columns, and updating these whenever the model is evaluated at a new point in the parameter space. We derive an a posteriori error bound that depends on these snapshot weights, show how these weights can be chosen to tighten the error bound, and present an algorithm to compute the corresponding reduced basis efficiently. We show how this weighted POD approach can be used to naturally generalize the calculation of reduced basis derivatives to situations with multidimensional parameter spaces and snapshots at multiple locations in the parameter space. Lastly, we cover how these approaches can be implemented within an optimization algorithm, without the need for an offline training phase. The proposed weighted POD methods with and without reduced basis derivatives are applied to a gradient-based shell thickness optimization problem with 105 design parameters and a time-dependent partial differential equation. The numerical solutions obtained for this problem attain errors that are several orders of magnitude smaller when using weighted POD than those computed with regular POD and Grassmann manifold interpolation, while having comparable wall times per query and requiring fewer high-dimensional model snapshots to reach an optimal solution.

math.NA↗

arXiv2025

Structure-preserving Lift & Learn: Scientific machine learning for nonlinear conservative partial differential equations

This work presents structure-preserving Lift & Learn, a scientific machine learning method that employs lifting variable transformations to learn structure-preserving reduced-order models for nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) with conservation laws. We propose a hybrid learning approach based on a recently developed energy-quadratization strategy that uses knowledge of the nonlinearity at the PDE level to derive an equivalent quadratic lifted system with quadratic system energy. The lifted dynamics obtained via energy quadratization are linear in the old variables, making model learning very effective in the lifted setting. Based on the lifted quadratic PDE model form, the proposed method derives quadratic reduced terms analytically and then uses those derived terms to formulate a constrained optimization problem to learn the remaining linear reduced operators in a structure-preserving way. The proposed hybrid learning approach yields computationally efficient quadratic reduced-order models that respect the underlying physics of the high-dimensional problem. We demonstrate the generalizability of quadratic models learned via the proposed structure-preserving Lift & Learn method through three numerical examples: the one-dimensional wave equation with exponential nonlinearity, the two-dimensional sine-Gordon equation, and the two-dimensional Klein-Gordon-Zakharov equations. The numerical results show that the proposed learning approach is competitive with the state-of-the-art structure-preserving data-driven model reduction method in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Risk-based Design Optimization for Powder Bed Fusion Metal Additive Manufacturing

Powder bed fusion is a widely used additive manufacturing (AM) process for producing complex, small-batch parts that are impractical to manufacture using conventional methods. However, its broader adoption is hindered by process-induced defects. The challenge in AM stems from inherent material and process uncertainties. Therefore, it is critical to account for these uncertainties in the design optimization and control of powder bed fusion AM processes. In this work, we formulate and solve a design optimization problem under uncertainty for a powder bed fusion metal AM process. Our objective is to minimize energy consumption while enforcing a risk-based constraint formulated with a buffered probability of failure on residual stress, along with a constraint on melting temperature to ensure a successful build. We use surrogate models for the residual stress and temperature snapshots to accelerate optimization; we train these models using data from high-fidelity finite element simulations. We validate the optimization results through additional high-fidelity simulations. The validated results demonstrate that the proposed optimization reduces energy consumption, enhances process reliability, and contributes to more robust and sustainable additive manufacturing.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Conservative projection-based data-driven model order reduction of a fluid-kinetic spectral solver

Kinetic simulations are computationally intensive due to six-dimensional phase space discretization. Many kinetic spectral solvers use the asymmetrically weighted Hermite expansion due to its conservation and fluid-kinetic coupling properties, i.e., the lower-order Hermite moments capture and describe the macroscopic fluid dynamics and higher-order Hermite moments describe the microscopic kinetic dynamics. We leverage this structure by developing a parametric data-driven reduced-order model based on the proper orthogonal decomposition, which projects the higher-order kinetic moments while retaining the fluid moments intact. This approach can also be understood as learning a nonlocal closure via a reduced modal decomposition. We demonstrate analytically and numerically that the method ensures local and global mass, momentum, and energy conservation. The numerical results show that the proposed method effectively replicates the high-dimensional spectral simulations at a fraction of the computational cost and memory, as validated on the weak Landau damping and two-stream instability benchmark problems.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2025

Parametric Operator Inference to Simulate the Purging Process in Semiconductor Manufacturing

This work presents the application of parametric Operator Inference (OpInf) -- a nonintrusive reduced-order modeling (ROM) technique that learns a low-dimensional representation of a high-fidelity model -- to the numerical model of the purging process in semiconductor manufacturing. Leveraging the data-driven nature of the OpInf framework, we aim to forecast the flow field within a plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) chamber using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation data. Our model simplifies the system by excluding plasma dynamics and chemical reactions, while still capturing the key features of the purging flow behavior. The parametric OpInf framework learns nine ROMs based on varying argon mass flow rates at the inlet and different outlet pressures. It then interpolates these ROMs to predict the system's behavior for 25 parameter combinations, including 16 scenarios that are not seen in training. The parametric OpInf ROMs, trained on 36\% of the data and tested on 64\%, demonstrate accuracy across the entire parameter domain, with a maximum error of 9.32\%. Furthermore, the ROM achieves an approximate 142-fold speedup in online computations compared to the full-order model CFD simulation. These OpInf ROMs may be used for fast and accurate predictions of the purging flow in the PECVD chamber, which could facilitate effective particle contamination control in semiconductor manufacturing.

math.NA↗

arXiv2025

Nonlinear energy-preserving model reduction with lifting transformations that quadratize the energy

Existing model reduction techniques for high-dimensional models of conservative partial differential equations (PDEs) encounter computational bottlenecks when dealing with systems featuring non-polynomial nonlinearities. This work presents a nonlinear model reduction method that employs lifting variable transformations to derive structure-preserving quadratic reduced-order models for conservative PDEs with general nonlinearities. We present an energy-quadratization strategy that defines the auxiliary variable in terms of the nonlinear term in the energy expression to derive an equivalent quadratic lifted system with quadratic system energy. The proposed strategy combined with proper orthogonal decomposition model reduction yields quadratic reduced-order models that conserve the quadratized lifted energy exactly in high dimensions. We demonstrate the proposed model reduction approach on four nonlinear conservative PDEs: the one-dimensional wave equation with exponential nonlinearity, the two-dimensional sine-Gordon equation, the two-dimensional Klein-Gordon equation with parametric dependence, and the two-dimensional Klein-Gordon-Zakharov equations. The numerical results show that the proposed lifting approach is competitive with the state-of-the-art structure-preserving hyper-reduction method in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency in the online stage while providing significant computational gains in the offline stage.

math.NA↗

arXiv2025

Discovering Polynomial and Quadratic Structure in Nonlinear Ordinary Differential Equations

Dynamical systems with quadratic or polynomial drift exhibit complex dynamics, yet compared to nonlinear systems in general form, are often easier to analyze, simulate, control, and learn. Results going back over a century have shown that the majority of nonpolynomial nonlinear systems can be recast in polynomial form, and their degree can be reduced further to quadratic. This process of polynomialization/quadratization reveals new variables (in most cases, additional variables have to be added to achieve this) in which the system dynamics adhere to that specific form, which leads us to discover new structures of a model. This chapter summarizes the state of the art for the discovery of polynomial and quadratic representations of finite-dimensional dynamical systems. We review known existence results, discuss the two prevalent algorithms for automating the discovery process, and give examples in form of a single-layer neural network and a phenomenological model of cell signaling.

cs.SC↗

arXiv2025

Physically consistent predictive reduced-order modeling by enhancing Operator Inference with state constraints

Numerical simulations of complex multiphysics systems, such as char combustion considered herein, yield numerous state variables that inherently exhibit physical constraints. This paper presents a new approach to augment Operator Inference -- a methodology within scientific machine learning that enables learning from data a low-dimensional representation of a high-dimensional system governed by nonlinear partial differential equations -- by embedding such state constraints in the reduced-order model predictions. In the model learning process, we propose a new way to choose regularization hyperparameters based on a key performance indicator. Since embedding state constraints improves the stability of the Operator Inference reduced-order model, we compare the proposed state constraints-embedded Operator Inference with the standard Operator Inference and other stability-enhancing approaches. For an application to char combustion, we demonstrate that the proposed approach yields state predictions superior to the other methods regarding stability and accuracy. It extrapolates over 200\% past the training regime while being computationally efficient and physically consistent.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2025

Data-Driven Reduced-Order Models for Port-Hamiltonian Systems with Operator Inference

Hamiltonian operator inference has been developed in [Sharma, H., Wang, Z., Kramer, B., Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 431, p.133122, 2022] to learn structure-preserving reduced-order models (ROMs) for Hamiltonian systems. The method constructs a low-dimensional model using only data and knowledge of the functional form of the Hamiltonian. The resulting ROMs preserve the intrinsic structure of the system, ensuring that the mechanical and physical properties of the system are maintained. In this work, we extend this approach to port-Hamiltonian systems, which generalize Hamiltonian systems by including energy dissipation, external input, and output. Based on snapshots of the system's state and output, together with the information about the functional form of the Hamiltonian, reduced operators are inferred through optimization and are then used to construct data-driven ROMs. To further alleviate the complexity of evaluating nonlinear terms in the ROMs, a hyper-reduction method via discrete empirical interpolation is applied. Accordingly, we derive error estimates for the ROM approximations of the state and output. Finally, we demonstrate the structure preservation, as well as the accuracy of the proposed port-Hamiltonian operator inference framework, through numerical experiments on a linear mass-spring-damper problem and a nonlinear Toda lattice problem.

math.NA↗

arXiv2024

Robust Design Optimization with Limited Data for Char Combustion

This work presents a robust design optimization approach for a char combustion process in a limited-data setting, where simulations of the fluid-solid coupled system are computationally expensive. We integrate a polynomial dimensional decomposition (PDD) surrogate model into the design optimization and induce computational efficiency in three key areas. First, we transform the input random variables to have fixed probability measures, which eliminates the need to recalculate the PDD's basis functions associated with these probability quantities. Second, using the limited data available from a physics-based high-fidelity solver, we estimate the PDD coefficients via sparsity-promoting diffeomorphic modulation under observable response preserving homotopy regression. Third, we propose a single-pass surrogate model training that avoids the need to generate new training data and update the PDD coefficients during the derivative-free optimization. The results provide insights for optimizing process parameters to ensure consistently high energy production from char combustion.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

Computing Solutions to the Polynomial-Polynomial Regulator Problem

We consider the optimal regulation problem for nonlinear control-affine dynamical systems. Whereas the linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) considers optimal control of a linear system with quadratic cost function, we study polynomial systems with polynomial cost functions; we call this problem the polynomial-polynomial regulator (PPR). The resulting polynomial feedback laws provide two potential improvements over linear feedback laws: 1) they more accurately approximate the optimal control law, resulting in lower control costs, and 2) for some problems they can provide a larger region of stabilization. We derive explicit formulas -- and a scalable, general purpose software implementation -- for computing the polynomial approximation to the value function that solves the optimal control problem. The method is illustrated first on a low-dimensional aircraft stall stabilization example, for which PPR control recovers the aircraft from more severe stall conditions than LQR control. Then we demonstrate the scalability of the approach on a semidiscretization of dimension $n=129$ of a partial differential equation, for which the PPR control reduces the control cost by approximately 75% compared to LQR for the initial condition of interest.

math.OC↗