Reduced-order description of fluid flow with moving boundaries by proper orthogonal decomposition

The approach of proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) has been extensively adopted for fluid dynamics in fixed geometries. This technique is examined here for fluid flow with moving boundaries; in the context of cavitating and phase change flows, and fluid-membrane interaction. The purpose is to assess the capability of POD in extracting the salient features and offering a compact representation to the CFD solutions associated with boundary movement. The cavitating flow simulations are investigated to distill the effect of turbulence modeling, between the Launder-Spalding and a filter-based turbulence models. The lower-order eigenmodes of the flow field, for both turbulence models, show different flow structures and global parameters between higher and lower cavitation numbers. The effect of multi-timescales produced by the filter-based turbulence model is discerned by POD analysis. For 3-D, membrane wing flows, very few POD modes seem sufficient for accurate representation of the velocity field. However, reduced-order analysis of the aerodynamic performance, which is strongly dictated by pressure, may be coarsened by moving membrane dynamics. The flow with fusion is further considered for its solid-liquid phase front propagation. While few modes can sufficiently construct the flow field for the later interval of the flow, a larger number of POD modes are required to provide the flow scales for the initial part of the phase change process.