Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics Research Seminar

This talk will describe a new method for assessing the stability of fluid flows governed by the Navier-Stokes equations. Finite-dimensional approximations to the Navier-Stokes equations typically take the form of a set of linear ODEs with an additional nonlinear term that conserves the total energy of the system state. A method for computing Lyapunov functions using sum-of-squares based convex optimization methods that exploits this energy conservation property will be presented for finite dimensional fluid models. These methods can be then applied to infinite dimensional models via robust optimization.