Conservative Model Order Reduction for Fluid Flow

In the past decade, model order reduction (MOR) has been successful in reducing the computational complexity of elliptic and parabolic systems of partial differential equations (PDEs). However, MOR of hyperbolic equations remains a challenge. Symmetries and conservation laws, which are a distinctive feature of such systems, are often destroyed by conventional MOR techniques which result in a perturbed, and often unstable reduced system. The importance of conservation of energy is well-known for a correct numerical integration of fluid flow. In this paper, we discuss model reduction, that exploits skew-symmetry of conservative and centered discretization schemes, to recover conservation of energy at the level of the reduced system. Moreover, we argue that the reduced system, constructed with the new method, can be identified by a reduced energy that mimics the energy of the high-fidelity system. Therefore, the loss in energy, associated with the model reduction, remains constant in time. This results in an, overall, correct evolution of the fluid that ensures robustness of the reduced system. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method through numerical simulation of various fluid flows, and through a numerical simulation of a continuous variable resonance combustor model.