arXiv subjects

Michael Woodward

Publications and source records attributed to Michael Woodward.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Learning turbulent transport via Mori--Zwanzig graph neural networks

We introduce a Mori--Zwanzig graph neural network (MZ--GNN) framework for learning reduced-order Lagrangian dynamics of tracer particles in homogeneous isotropic turbulence. The model represents particle acceleration as a finite-memory expansion over present and delayed particle-neighborhood graphs, with each memory contribution parameterized by an equivariant message-passing graph neural network. By construction, the architecture respects the relevant physical symmetries of the problem, including permutation equivariance, Galilean invariance, and equivariance under rotations and reflections. Trained on direct numerical simulation data, the model is rolled out autoregressively and evaluated on observables that are not imposed during training. We show that memory is essential for recovering the intermittent, heavy-tailed acceleration statistics, and that the learned dynamics accurately reproduce single-particle dispersion, pair-dispersion statistics, and four-particle tetrad geometry. Our results establish a physically structured, scalable route to data-driven multi-particle simulation of turbulent transport, and a template for learning reduced dynamics of correlated, symmetry-rich particle systems.

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arXiv2025

Data-driven Mori-Zwanzig modeling of Lagrangian particle dynamics in turbulent flows

The dynamics of Lagrangian particles in turbulence play a crucial role in mixing, transport, and dispersion in complex flows. Their trajectories exhibit highly non-trivial statistical behavior, motivating the development of surrogate models that can reproduce these trajectories without incurring the high computational cost of direct numerical simulations of the full Eulerian field. This task is particularly challenging because reduced-order models typically lack access to the full set of interactions with the underlying turbulent field. Novel data-driven machine learning techniques can be powerful in capturing and reproducing complex statistics of the reduced-order/surrogate dynamics. In this work, we show how one can learn a surrogate dynamical system that is able to evolve a turbulent Lagrangian trajectory in a way that is point-wise accurate for short-time predictions (with respect to Kolmogorov time) and stable and statistically accurate at long times. This approach is based on the Mori-Zwanzig formalism, which prescribes a mathematical decomposition of the full dynamical system into resolved dynamics that depend on the current state and the past history of a reduced set of observables, and the unresolved orthogonal dynamics due to unresolved degrees of freedom of the initial state. We show how by training this reduced order model on a point-wise error metric on short time-prediction, we are able to correctly learn the dynamics of Lagrangian turbulence, such that also the long-time statistical behavior is stably recovered at test time. This opens up a range of new applications, for example, for the control of active Lagrangian agents in turbulence.

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arXiv2025

Lagrangian Attention Tensor Networks for Velocity Gradient Statistical Modeling

Direct numerical simulation of turbulence at realistic Reynolds numbers is still beyond current computational capability, necessitating models that reduce the number of resolved spatial scales. Motivated by phenomenology and recent data-driven works based on universality of the smallest scales in fully developed turbulence, the statistical dynamics of the velocity gradient tensor (VGT) at the Kolmogorov scale become of critical importance in advancing turbulence models. Physics-informed machine learning has found considerable success in exploiting large datasets taken from direct numerical simulation of Navier-Stokes to improve models for the evolution of the VGT. In this work, we follow the long line of blending physical insight with data analysis to simultaneously advance both the modeling and understanding of the phenomenology of the VGT. Using the intimate connection between VGT evolution and fluid deformation, we develop the Lagrangian attention tensor network approach that significantly improves over current physics-informed machine learning methods. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in both a-priori and a-posteriori metrics, before interpreting the trained attention mechanisms to discover a surprising connection between the history of the strain-rate-tensor and the pressure Hessian.

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arXiv2023

Mori-Zwanzig mode decomposition: Comparison with time-delay embeddings

We introduce the Mori-Zwanzig Mode Decomposition (MZMD), a novel data-driven technique for efficient modal analysis of and reduced-order modeling of large-scale spatio-temporal dynamical systems. MZMD represents an extension of Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) by providing an approximate closure term with MZ memory kernels accounting for how the unresolved modes of DMD interact with the resolved modes, thus addressing limitations when the state-space observables do not form a Koopman-invariant subspace. Leveraging the Mori-Zwanzig (MZ) formalism, MZMD identifies the modes and spectrum of the discrete-time Generalized Langevin Equation (GLE); an integro-differential equation that governs the dynamics of selected observables and their memory-dependent coupling with the unresolved degrees of freedom. This feature fundamentally distinguishes MZMD from time-delay embedding methods, such as Higher-Order DMD (HODMD). In this work, we derive and analyze MZMD and compare it with DMD and HODMD, using two exemplary Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) datasets: a 2D flow over a cylinder (as validation) and laminar-turbulent boundary-layer transition over a flared cone at Mach 6. We demonstrate that MZMD, via the addition of MZ memory terms, improves the resolution of spatio-temporal structures within the transitional/turbulent regime by the introduction of transient and periodic modes (not captured by DMD), which contain features that arise due to nonlinear mechanisms, such as the generation of the so-called hot streaks on the surface of the flared cone. Our results demonstrate that MZMD serves as an efficient generalization of DMD (reducing to DMD in the absence of memory), improves stability, and exhibits greater robustness and resistance to overfitting compared to HODMD.

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arXiv2023

Physics informed machine learning with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics: Hierarchy of reduced Lagrangian models of turbulence

Building efficient, accurate and generalizable reduced order models of developed turbulence remains a major challenge. This manuscript approaches this problem by developing a hierarchy of parameterized reduced Lagrangian models for turbulent flows, and investigates the effects of enforcing physical structure through Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) versus relying on neural networks (NN)s as universal function approximators. Starting from Neural Network (NN) parameterizations of a Lagrangian acceleration operator, this hierarchy of models gradually incorporates a weakly compressible and parameterized SPH framework, which enforces physical symmetries, such as Galilean, rotational and translational invariances. Within this hierarchy, two new parameterized smoothing kernels are developed in order to increase the flexibility of the learn-able SPH simulators. For each model we experiment with different loss functions which are minimized using gradient based optimization, where efficient computations of gradients are obtained by using Automatic Differentiation (AD) and Sensitivity Analysis (SA). Each model within the hierarchy is trained on two data sets associated with weekly compressible Homogeneous Isotropic Turbulence (HIT): (1) a validation set using weakly compressible SPH; and (2) a high fidelity set from Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS). Numerical evidence shows that encoding more SPH structure improves generalizability to different turbulent Mach numbers and time shifts, and that including the novel parameterized smoothing kernels improves the accuracy of SPH at the resolved scales.

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arXiv2023

Data-Driven Mori-Zwanzig: Reduced Order Modeling of Sparse Sensors Measurements for Boundary Layer Transition

Understanding, predicting and controlling laminar-turbulent boundary-layer transition is crucial for the next generation aircraft design. However, in real flight experiments, or wind tunnel tests, often only sparse sensor measurements can be collected at fixed locations. Thus, in developing reduced models for predicting and controlling the flow at the sensor locations, the main challenge is in accounting for how the surrounding field of unobserved variables interacts with the observed variables at the fixed sensor locations. This makes the Mori-Zwanzig (MZ) formalism a natural choice, as it results in the Generalized Langevin Equations which provides a framework for constructing non-Markovian reduced-order models that includes the effects the unresolved variables have on the resolved variables. These effects are captured in the so called memory kernel and orthogonal dynamics. In this work, we explore the data-driven MZ formulations to two boundary layer flows obtained from DNS data; a low speed incompressible flow; and a high speed compressible flow over a flared cone at Mach 6. An array of "sensors" are placed near the surface of the solid boundary, and the MZ operators are learned and the predictions are compared to the Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (EDMD), both using delay embedded coordinates. Further comparisons are made with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and a regression based projection framework using neural networks for the MZ operators. First we compare the effects of including delay embedded coordinates with EDMD and Mori based MZ and provide evidence that using both memory and delay embedded coordinates minimizes generalization errors on the relevant time scales. Next, we provide numerical evidence that the data-driven regression based projection MZ model performs best with respect to the prediction accuracy (minimum generalization error) on the relevant time scales.

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arXiv2023

Data-Driven Mori-Zwanzig: Approaching a Reduced Order Model for Hypersonic Boundary Layer Transition

In this work, we apply, for the first time to spatially inhomogeneous flows, a recently developed data-driven learning algorithm of Mori-Zwanzig (MZ) operators, which is based on a generalized Koopman's description of dynamical systems. The MZ formalism provides a mathematically exact procedure for constructing non-Markovian reduced-order models of resolved variables from high-dimensional dynamical systems, where the effects due to the unresolved dynamics are captured in the memory kernel and orthogonal dynamics. The algorithm developed in this work applies Mori's linear projection operator and an SVD based compression to the selection of the resolved variables (equivalently, a low rank approximation of the two time covariance matrices). We show that this MZ decomposition not only identifies the same spatio-temporal structures found by DMD, but it can also be used to extract spatio-temporal structures of the hysteresis effects present in the memory kernels. We perform an analysis of these structures in the context of a laminar-turbulent boundary-layer transition flow over a flared cone at Mach 6, and show the dynamical relevance of the memory kernels. Additionally, by including these memory terms learned in our data-driven MZ approach, we show improvement in prediction accuracy over DMD at the same level of truncation and at a similar computational cost. Furthermore, an analysis of the spatio-temporal structures of the MZ operators shows identifiable structures associated with the nonlinear generation of the so-called "hot" streaks on the surface of the flared code, which have previously been observed in experiments and direct numerical simulations.

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arXiv2022

Lagrangian Large Eddy Simulations via Physics Informed Machine Learning

High Reynolds Homogeneous Isotropic Turbulence is fully described within the Navier-Stokes (NS) equations, which are notoriously difficult to solve numerically. Engineers, interested primarily in describing turbulence at a reduced range of resolved scales, have designed heuristics, known as Large Eddy Simulation (LES). LES is described in terms of the temporally evolving Eulerian velocity field defined over a spatial grid with the mean-spacing correspondent to the resolved scale. This classic Eulerian LES depends on assumptions about effects of sub-grid scales on the resolved scales. Here, we take an alternative approach and design novel LES heuristics stated in terms of Lagrangian particles moving with the flow. Our Lagrangian LES, thus L-LES, is described by equations generalizing the weakly compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics formulation with extended parametric and functional freedom, which is then resolved via Machine Learning training on Lagrangian data from Direct Numerical Simulations of the NS equations. The L-LES model includes physics-informed parameterization and functional form, by combining physics-based parameters and physics-inspired Neural Networks to describe the evolution of turbulence within the resolved range of scales. The sub-grid scale contributions are modeled separately with physical constraints to account for the effects from un-resolved scales. We build the resulting model under the Differentiable Programming framework to facilitate efficient training. We experiment with loss functions of different types, including physics-informed ones accounting for statistics of Lagrangian particles. We show that our Lagrangian LES model is capable of reproducing Eulerian and unique Lagrangian turbulence structures and statistics over a range of turbulent Mach numbers.

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