Galerkin spectral estimation of vortex-dominated wake flows

We propose a technique for performing spectral (in time) analysis of spatially-resolved flowfield data, without needing any temporal resolution or information. This is achieved by combining projection-based reduced-order modeling with spectral proper orthogonal decomposition. In this method, space-only proper orthogonal decomposition is first performed on velocity data to identify a subspace onto which the known equations of motion are projected, following standard Galerkin projection techniques. The resulting reduced-order model is then utilized to generate time-resolved trajectories of data. Spectral proper orthogonal decomposition (SPOD) is then applied to this model-generated data to obtain a prediction of the spectral content of the system, while predicted SPOD modes can be obtained by lifting back to the original velocity field domain. This method is first demonstrated on a forced, randomly generated linear system, before being applied to study and reconstruct the spectral content of two-dimensional flow over two collinear flat plates perpendicular to an oncoming flow. At the range of Reynolds numbers considered, this configuration features an unsteady wake characterized by the formation and interaction of vortical structures in the wake. Depending on the Reynolds number, the wake can be periodic or feature broadband behavior, making it an insightful test case to assess the performance of the proposed method. In particular, we show that this method can accurately recover the spectral content of periodic, quasi-periodic, and broadband flows without utilizing any temporal information in the original data. To emphasize that temporal resolution is not required, we show that the predictive accuracy of the proposed method is robust to using temporally-subsampled data. Graphical abstract