Unsteady flow enhancement on an airfoil using sliding window weak-constraint four-dimensional variational data assimilation

This study establishes a continuous sliding window weak-constraint four-dimensional variational approach for reproducing a complete instantaneous flow from sparse spatiotemporal velocity observations. The initial condition, boundary condition, and model-form uncertainties are corrected simultaneously by a spatiotemporally varying additive forcing, coupled with the large eddy simulation (LES) framework, which reinforces subgrid-scale viscosity stresses and simplifies gradient computation. The additive force undergoes a Stokes–Helmholtz decomposition to ensure divergence-free projection and natural pressure determination. The model is theoretically derived to minimize discrepancies between the sparse velocity observations and the numerical predictions of the primary-adjoint system, enabling optimal contribution of the additive force. Synthetic data from a fine-grid LES of the vortical flow over an NACA0012 airfoil are used as observations. The algorithm is evaluated on a benchmark case, where observations are subsampled at 1/400 000 spatiotemporal resolution required for an LES. The sliding window strategy expands the dependence domain of the observations and mitigates the impact of primary-adjoint chaos, achieving over 90% pointwise correlation for filtered parameters and 80% spectral correlation for all of the resolved wavenumbers. Despite the lack of near-wall observations, streaks are accurately recovered due to the convective sensitivity of the observations from the outer flow. While the pressure fluctuation in the inflow region is not as well excited as in LES, recovery is augmented downstream. In both the inner and outer wall layers, the pressure distributions are obtained reasonably well by capturing the signatures of the vortical structure and their downstream convection. The robustness of the algorithm to observation noise is demonstrated. Finally, the impact of temporal resolution on estimation is evaluated, establishing a resolution threshold for successful reconstruction.