MMAE Seminar Series: Scott Dawson

The Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering presents the 2024–2025 seminar series featuring Scott Dawson, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Illinois Tech. Dawson will present “Understanding and Controlling Fluid Flows Using Data, Physics, and Machine Learning.” This seminar will take place on Wednesday, August 28, 2024, from 12:45–1:45 p.m. in room 104 of the Rettaliata Engineering Center.

Abstract

This talk will discuss several approaches for reduced-complexity modeling, coherent structure prediction, and feedback control of unsteady fluid flows. One common thread across the methods to be discussed will be the use of sparsity-promoting optimization methods to identify localized linear energy amplification mechanisms, obtain minimal-physics models, and select favorable sensor locations for real time estimation and control. The first part of the talk will describe a methodology for exploiting neural network architectures to perform a variety of common flow analysis and control tasks. Starting with a nonlinear fluid system equipped with some means of actuation, a neural network surrogate model is first identified for the actuated system, which is subsequently used to train a second neural network designed to achieve a desired control objective. This approach is used to obtain feedback control laws designed to drive unstable, nonlinear systems to their equilibria. The second part of this talk will focus on the identification of linear energy amplification mechanisms within turbulent fluid flows. In particular, I will describe a generalized variant of resolvent-based analysis methods that is able to identify time-localized amplification mechanisms within both statistically stationary and time-evolving flows. I will further show how sparsity-promoting methods can be applied to identify the terms within the governing equations primarily responsible for producing such energy amplification. The seminar will conclude with a brief overview of other aspects of my current and future research program.

Biography

Scott Dawson is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology, and he completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. His research interests include reduced-order and data-driven modeling, optimization and control in fluid mechanics, with a particular focus on modeling wall-bounded turbulent flows and unsteady aerodynamic systems. His research has been supported by AFOSR and an NSF CAREER award.