Main results of the first Data Assimilation Challenge

Abstract

This work presents the main results of the first Data Assimilation (DA) challenge, conducted within the framework of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project HOMER (Holistic Optical Metrology for Aero-Elastic Research), grant agreement number 769237. The challenge was jointly organised by the research groups of DLR, ONERA and TU Delft. The same synthetic test case as in the Lagrangian Particle Tracking (LPT) challenge (also presented in this symposium) was considered, reproducing the flow in the wake of a cylinder in proximity of a flat wall. The participants were provided with three datasets containing the measured particles locations and their trajectories identification numbers, at increasing tracers concentrations from 0.04 to 1.4 particles/mm³ . The requested outputs were the three components of the velocity, the nine components of the velocity gradient and the static pressure, defined on a Cartesian grid at one specific time instant. The results were analysed in terms of errors of the output quantities and their distributions. Additionally, the performances of the different DA algorithms were compared with that of a standard linear interpolation approach. Although the velocity errors were found to be in the same range as those of the linear interpolation algorithm, typically between 3% and 12% of the bulk velocity, the use of the DA algorithms enabled an increase of the measurement spatial resolution by a factor between 3 and 4. The errors of the velocity gradient were of the order of 10-15% of the peak vorticity magnitude. Accurate pressure reconstruction was achieved in the flow field, whereas the evaluation of the surface pressure revealed more challenging.