Active Flow Control for Bluff Body Drag Reduction Using Reinforcement Learning with Partial Measurements

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xia, Chengwei, Zhang, Junjie, Kerrigan, Eric C., Rigas, Georgios
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Xia, Chengwei
Zhang, Junjie
Kerrigan, Eric C.
Rigas, Georgios
author_facet Xia, Chengwei
Zhang, Junjie
Kerrigan, Eric C.
Rigas, Georgios
contents Active flow control for drag reduction with reinforcement learning (RL) is performed in the wake of a 2D square bluff body at laminar regimes with vortex shedding. Controllers parameterised by neural networks are trained to drive two blowing and suction jets that manipulate the unsteady flow. RL with full observability (sensors in the wake) successfully discovers a control policy which reduces the drag by suppressing the vortex shedding in the wake. However, a non-negligible performance degradation (~50% less drag reduction) is observed when the controller is trained with partial measurements (sensors on the body). To mitigate this effect, we propose an energy-efficient, dynamic, maximum entropy RL control scheme. First, an energy-efficiency-based reward function is proposed to optimise the energy consumption of the controller while maximising drag reduction. Second, the controller is trained with an augmented state consisting of both current and past measurements and actions, which can be formulated as a nonlinear autoregressive exogenous model, to alleviate the partial observability problem. Third, maximum entropy RL algorithms (Soft Actor Critic and Truncated Quantile Critics) which promote exploration and exploitation in a sample efficient way are used and discover near-optimal policies in the challenging case of partial measurements. Stabilisation of the vortex shedding is achieved in the near wake using only surface pressure measurements on the rear of the body, resulting in similar drag reduction as in the case with wake sensors. The proposed approach opens new avenues for dynamic flow control using partial measurements for realistic configurations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_12650
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Active Flow Control for Bluff Body Drag Reduction Using Reinforcement Learning with Partial Measurements
Xia, Chengwei
Zhang, Junjie
Kerrigan, Eric C.
Rigas, Georgios
Fluid Dynamics
Active flow control for drag reduction with reinforcement learning (RL) is performed in the wake of a 2D square bluff body at laminar regimes with vortex shedding. Controllers parameterised by neural networks are trained to drive two blowing and suction jets that manipulate the unsteady flow. RL with full observability (sensors in the wake) successfully discovers a control policy which reduces the drag by suppressing the vortex shedding in the wake. However, a non-negligible performance degradation (~50% less drag reduction) is observed when the controller is trained with partial measurements (sensors on the body). To mitigate this effect, we propose an energy-efficient, dynamic, maximum entropy RL control scheme. First, an energy-efficiency-based reward function is proposed to optimise the energy consumption of the controller while maximising drag reduction. Second, the controller is trained with an augmented state consisting of both current and past measurements and actions, which can be formulated as a nonlinear autoregressive exogenous model, to alleviate the partial observability problem. Third, maximum entropy RL algorithms (Soft Actor Critic and Truncated Quantile Critics) which promote exploration and exploitation in a sample efficient way are used and discover near-optimal policies in the challenging case of partial measurements. Stabilisation of the vortex shedding is achieved in the near wake using only surface pressure measurements on the rear of the body, resulting in similar drag reduction as in the case with wake sensors. The proposed approach opens new avenues for dynamic flow control using partial measurements for realistic configurations.
title Active Flow Control for Bluff Body Drag Reduction Using Reinforcement Learning with Partial Measurements
topic Fluid Dynamics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12650