Publications

Detecting Combustion and Flow Features In Situ Using Principal Component Analysis

Grout, Ray G.; Bennett, Janine C.; Fabian, Nathan D.

This report presents progress on identifying and classifying features involving combustion in turbulent flow using principal component analysis (PCA) and k-means clustering using an in situ analysis framework. We describe a process for extracting temporally- and spatially-varying information from the simulation, classifying the information, and then applying the classification algorithm to either other portions of the simulation not used for training the classifier or further simulations. Because the regions classified as being of interest take up a small portion of the overall simulation domain, it will consume fewer resources to perform further analysis or save these regions at a higher fidelity than previously possible. The implementation of this process is partially complete and results obtained from PCA of test data is presented that indicates the process may have merit: the basis vectors that PCA provides are significantly different in regions where combustion is occurring and even when all 21 species of a lifted flame simulation are correlated the computational cost of PCA is minimal. What remains to be determined is whether k-means (or other) clustering techniques will be able to identify combined combustion and flow features with an accuracy that makes further characterization of these regions feasible and meaningful.