An Overview of Variational Integrators

The purpose of this paper is to survey some recent advances in variational integrators for both finite dimensional mechanical systems as well as continuum mechanics. These advances include the general development of discrete mechanics, applications to dissipative systems, collisions, spacetime integration algorithms, AVI’s (Asynchronous Variational Integrators), as well as reduction for discrete mechanical systems. To keep the article within the set limits, we will only treat each topic briefly and will not attempt to develop any particular topic in any depth. We hope, nonetheless, that this paper serves as a useful guide to the literature as well as to future directions and open problems in the subject

Symplectic Model Reduction of Hamiltonian Systems

In this paper, a symplectic model reduction technique, proper symplectic decomposition (PSD) with symplectic Galerkin projection, is proposed to save the computational cost for the simplification of large-scale Hamiltonian systems while preserving the symplectic structure. As an analogy to the classical proper orthogonal decomposition (POD)-Galerkin approach, PSD is designed to build a symplectic subspace to fit empirical data, while the symplectic Galerkin projection constructs a reduced Hamiltonian system on the symplectic subspace. For practical use, we introduce three algorithms for PSD, which are based upon: the cotangent lift, complex singular value decomposition, and nonlinear programming. The proposed technique has been proven to preserve system energy and stability. Moreover, PSD can be combined with the discrete empirical interpolation method to reduce the computational cost for nonlinear Hamiltonian systems. Owing to these properties, the proposed technique is better suited than the classical POD-Galerkin approach for model reduction of Hamiltonian systems, especially when long-time integration is required. The stability, accuracy, and efficiency of the proposed technique are illustrated through numerical simulations of linear and nonlinear wave equations.Comment: 25 pages, 13 figure

Lagrangian Data-Driven Reduced Order Modeling of Finite Time Lyapunov Exponents

There are two main strategies for improving the projection-based reduced order model (ROM) accuracy: (i) improving the ROM, i.e., adding new terms to the standard ROM; and (ii) improving the ROM basis, i.e., constructing ROM bases that yield more accurate ROMs. In this paper, we use the latter. We propose new Lagrangian inner products that we use together with Eulerian and Lagrangian data to construct new Lagrangian ROMs. We show that the new Lagrangian ROMs are orders of magnitude more accurate than the standard Eulerian ROMs, i.e., ROMs that use standard Eulerian inner product and data to construct the ROM basis. Specifically, for the quasi-geostrophic equations, we show that the new Lagrangian ROMs are more accurate than the standard Eulerian ROMs in approximating not only Lagrangian fields (e.g., the finite time Lyapunov exponent (FTLE)), but also Eulerian fields (e.g., the streamfunction). We emphasize that the new Lagrangian ROMs do not employ any closure modeling to model the effect of discarded modes (which is standard procedure for low-dimensional ROMs of complex nonlinear systems). Thus, the dramatic increase in the new Lagrangian ROMs' accuracy is entirely due to the novel Lagrangian inner products used to build the Lagrangian ROM basis