Interplay of Sensor Quantity, Placement and System Dimension in POD-Based Sparse Reconstruction of Fluid Flows

Sparse linear estimation of fluid flows using data-driven proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) basis is systematically explored in this work. Fluid flows are manifestations of nonlinear multiscale partial differential equations (PDE) dynamical systems with inherent scale separation that impact the system dimensionality. Given that sparse reconstruction is inherently an ill-posed problem, the most successful approaches require the knowledge of the underlying low-dimensional space spanning the manifold in which the system resides. In this paper, we adopt an approach that learns basis from singular value decomposition (SVD) of training data to recover sparse information. This results in a set of four design parameters for sparse recovery, namely, the choice of basis, system dimension required for sufficiently accurate reconstruction, sensor budget and their placement. The choice of design parameters implicitly determines the choice of algorithm as either l(2) minimization reconstruction or sparsity promoting l(1) minimization reconstruction. In this work, we systematically explore the implications of these design parameters on reconstruction accuracy so that practical recommendations can be identified. We observe that greedy-smart sensor placement, particularly interpolation points from the discrete empirical interpolation method (DEIM), provide the best balance of computational complexity and accurate reconstruction.