Registration-based nonlinear model reduction of parametrized aerodynamics problems with applications to transonic Euler and RANS flows

We develop a registration-based nonlinear model-order reduction (MOR) method for partial differential equations (PDEs) with applications to transonic Euler and Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations in aerodynamics. These PDEs exhibit discontinuous features, namely shocks, whose location depends on problem configuration parameters, and the associated parametric solution manifold exhibits a slowly decaying Kolmogorov N-width. As a result, conventional linear MOR methods, which use linear reduced approximation spaces, do not yield accurate low-dimensional approximations. We present a registration-based nonlinear MOR method to overcome this challenge. Our formulation builds on the following key ingredients: (i) a geometrically transformable parametrized PDE discretization; (ii) localized spline-based parametrized transformations which warp the domain to align discontinuities; (iii) an efficient dilation-based shock sensor and metric to compute optimal transformation parameters; (iv) hyperreduction and online-efficient output-based error estimates; and (v) simultaneous transformation and adaptive finite element training. Compared to existing methods in the literature, our formulation is efficiently scalable to larger problems and is equipped with error estimates and hyperreduction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method on two-dimensional inviscid and turbulent flows modeled by the Euler and RANS equations, respectively. •Registration-based nonlinear reduced order model for transonic aerodynamic flows.•Scalable shock detection and localized transformation optimization to align shocks.•Hyperreduction and a posteriori output error estimation for nonlinear reduced model.•Demonstration of 1000x speedup at 1% drag error for transonic Euler and RANS flows.