A comparative study of data-driven modal decomposition analysis of unforced and forced cylinder wakes

The present study on the recognition of coherent structures in flow fields was conducted using three typical data-driven modal decomposition methods: proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), dynamic mode decomposition (DMD), and Fourier mode decomposition (FMD). Two real circular cylinder wake flows (forced and unforced), obtained from two-dimensional particle image velocimetry (2D PIV) measurements, were analyzed to extract the coherent structures. It was found that the POD method could be used to extract the large-scale structures from the fluctuating velocity in a wake flow, the DMD method showed potential for dynamical mode frequency identification and linear reconstruction of the flow field, and the FMD method provided a significant computational efficiency advantage when the dominant frequency of the flow field was known. The limitations of the three methods were also identified: The POD method was incomplete in the spatial–temporal decomposition and each mode mixed multiple frequencies leading to unclear physics, the DMD method is based on the linear assumption and thus the highly nonlinear part of the flow field was unsuitable, and the FMD method is based on global power spectrum analysis while being overwhelmed by an unknown high-frequency flow field. Graphic Abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]