Spectral proper orthogonal decomposition using sub-Nyquist rate data

Caroline Cardinale, Steven L. Brunton, Tim Colonius

Published 2025-01-03Version 1

Modal decomposition methods are important for characterizing the low-dimensional dynamics of complex systems, including turbulent flows. Different methods have varying data requirements and produce modes with different properties. Spectral proper orthogonal decomposition (SPOD) produces orthogonal, energy-ranked spatial modes at discrete temporal frequencies for statistically stationary flows. However, SPOD requires long stretches of sequential, uniformly sampled, time-resolved data. These data requirements limit SPOD's use in experimental settings where the maximum capture rate of a camera is often slower than the Nyquist sampling rate required to resolve the highest turbulent frequencies. However, if two PIV systems operate in tandem, pairs of data can be acquired that are arbitrarily close in time. The dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) uses this pairwise data to resolve frequencies up to the Nyquist frequency associated with the small time step within a pair. However, these modes do not form an orthonormal basis and have no set ranking. The present work attempts to compute SPOD modes from pairwise data with a small time step but with large gaps between pairs. We use DMD on pairwise data to estimate segment-wise, uniformly sampled series that can then be used to estimate the SPOD modes, intending to resolve frequencies between the gap and pair Nyquist limits. The method is tested on numerically obtained data of the linearized complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, as well as a Mach 0.4 isothermal turbulent jet. For the jet, pairwise SPOD can accurately de-alias the SPOD spectrum and estimate mode shapes at frequencies up to St = 1.0 while using over 90% less data.