Project DisCo: Physics-Based Discovery of Coherent Structures in Spatiotemporal Systems

Awarded an AGU Outstanding Student Presentation Award

Video for flow around a cylinder -- This is a Lattice Boltzmann simulation of a von Karman Vortex Street. Initially the video shows the vorticity values for the flow, and then it slowly transitions to showing the local causal states for the flow. That is, at the end each color represents a unique local causal state.

Video for 2D turbulent flow -- This is a spatial subsampling of a turbulent flow on a periodic 2D domain using a pseudo-spectral solver. The flow repeats three times; first shows the vorticity value of the flow, second shows a transition from vorticity value to local causal states, and the third is just the local causal states of the flow.

Segmentation demonstration for 2D turbulent flow -- The same 2D turbulent flow above is repeated again, but here a certain subset of local causal states are used for an example segmentation analysis. Any point in the flow that corresponds to one of these local causal states is colored red, otherwise the vorticity value is shown.