Tutorial on Feedback Control of Flows, Part I: Stabilization of Fluid Flows in Channels and Pipes

The field of flow control has picked up pace over the past decade or so, on the promise of real-time distributed control on turbulent scales being realizable in the near future. This promise is due to the micromachining technology that emerged in the 1980s and developed at an amazing speed through the 1990s. In lab experiments, so called micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) that incorporate the entire detection-decision-actuation process on a single chip, have been batch processed in large numbers and assembled into flexible skins for gluing onto body-fluid interfaces for drag reduction purposes. Control of fluid flows span a wide variety of specialities. In Part I of this tutorial, we focus on the problem of reducing drag in channel and pipe flows by stabilizing the parabolic equilibrium profile using boundary feedback control. The control strategics used for this problem include classical control, based on the Nyquist criteria, and various optimal control techniques (H2, H-Infinity), as well as applications of Lyapunov stability theory.