Surfing the edge: using feedback control to find nonlinear solutions

Many transitional wall-bounded shear flows are characterised by the coexistence in state space of laminar and turbulent regimes. Probing the edge boundary between the two attractors has led in the last decade to the numerical discovery of new (unstable) solutions to the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. However, the iterative bisection method used to compute edge states can become prohibitively costly for large systems. Here we suggest a simple feedback control strategy to stabilise edge states, hence accelerating their numerical identification by several orders of magnitude. The method is illustrated for several configurations of cylindrical pipe flow. Travelling waves solutions are identified as edge states, and can be isolated rapidly in only one short numerical run. A new branch of solutions is also identified. When the edge state is a periodic orbit or chaotic state, the feedback control does not converge precisely to solutions of the uncontrolled system, but nevertheless brings the dynamics very close to the original edge manifold in a single run. We discuss the opportunities offered by the speed and simplicity of this new method to probe the structure of both state space and parameter space.