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The purpose of this work is to develop a universal computer program (solver) which solves kinetic Boltzmann equation for simulations of rarefied gas flows in complexly shaped devices. The structure of the solver is described in details. Its efficiency is demonstrated on an example of calculations of a modern many tubes Knudsen pump. The kinetic Boltzmann equation is solved by finite-difference method on discrete grid in spatial and velocity spaces. The differential advection operator is approximated by finite difference method. The calculation of the collision integral is based on the conservative projection method.

In the developed computational program the unstructured spatial mesh is generated using GMSH and may include prisms, tetrahedrons, hexahedrons and pyramids. The mesh is denser in areas of flow with large gradients of gas parameters. A three-dimensional velocity grid consists of cubic cells of equal volume.

A huge amount of calculations requires effective parallelization of the algorithm which is implemented in the program with the use of Message Passing Interface (MPI) technology. An information transfer from one node to another is implemented as a kind of boundary condition. As a result, every MPI node contains the information about only its part of the grid.

The main result of the work is presented in the graph of pressure difference in 2 reservoirs connected by a multitube Knudsen pump from Knudsen number. This characteristic of the Knudsen pump obtained by numerical methods shows the quality of the pump. Distributions of pressure, temperature and gas concentration in a steady state inside the pump and the reservoirs are presented as well.

The correctness of the solver is checked using two special test solutions of more simple boundary problems — test with temperature distribution between 2 planes with different temperatures and test with conservation of total gas mass.

The correctness of the obtained data for multitube Knudsen pump is checked using denser spatial and velocity grids, using more collisions in collision integral per time step.

The article is devoted to solving ill-posed problems of mathematical physics for elliptic and parabolic equations, such as the Cauchy problem for the Helmholtz equation and the retrospective Cauchy problem for the heat equation with constant coefficients. These problems are reduced to problems of convex optimization in Hilbert space. The gradients of the corresponding functionals are calculated approximately by solving two well-posed problems. A new method is proposed for solving the optimization problems under study, it is component-by-component descent in the basis of eigenfunctions of a self-adjoint operator associated with the problem. If it was possible to calculate the gradient exactly, this method would give an arbitrarily exact solution of the problem, depending on the number of considered elements of the basis. In real cases, the inaccuracy of calculations leads to a violation of monotonicity, which requires the use of restarts and limits the achievable quality. The paper presents the results of experiments confirming the effectiveness of the constructed method. It is determined that the new approach is superior to approaches based on the use of gradient optimization methods: it allows to achieve better quality of solution with significantly less computational resources. It is assumed that the constructed method can be generalized to other problems.

An algorithm is proposed to identify parameters of a 2D vortex structure used on information about the flow velocity at a finite (small) set of reference points. The approach is based on using a set of point vortices as a model system and minimizing a functional that compares the model and known sets of velocity vectors in the space of model parameters. For numerical implementation, the method of gradient descent with step size control, approximation of derivatives by finite differences, and the analytical expression of the velocity field induced by the point vortex model are used. An experimental analysis of the operation of the algorithm on test flows is carried out: one and a system of several point vortices, a Rankine vortex, and a Lamb dipole. According to the velocity fields of test flows, the velocity vectors utilized for identification were arranged in a randomly distributed set of reference points (from 3 to 200 pieces). Using the computations, it was determined that: the algorithm converges to the minimum from a wide range of initial approximations; the algorithm converges in all cases when the reference points are located in areas where the streamlines of the test and model systems are topologically equivalent; if the streamlines of the systems are not topologically equivalent, then the percentage of successful calculations decreases, but convergence can also take place; when the method converges, the coordinates of the vortices of the model system are close to the centers of the vortices of the test configurations, and in many cases, the values of their circulations also; con-vergence depends more on location than on the number of vectors used for identification. The results of the study allow us to recommend the proposed algorithm for identifying 2D vortex structures whose streamlines are topologically close to systems of point vortices.

In this paper we consider the controlled motion of a helical body with three blades in an ideal fluid, which is executed by rotating three internal rotors. We set the problem of selecting control actions, which ensure the motion of the body near the predetermined trajectory. To determine controls that guarantee motion near the given curve, we propose methods based on the application of hybrid genetic algorithms (genetic algorithms with real encoding and with additional learning of the leader of the population by a gradient method) and artificial neural networks. The correctness of the operation of the proposed numerical methods is estimated using previously obtained differential equations, which define the law of changing the control actions for the predetermined trajectory.

In the approach based on hybrid genetic algorithms, the initial problem of minimizing the integral functional reduces to minimizing the function of many variables. The given time interval is broken up into small elements, on each of which the control actions are approximated by Lagrangian polynomials of order 2 and 3. When appropriately adjusted, the hybrid genetic algorithms reproduce a solution close to exact. However, the cost of calculation of 1 second of the physical process is about 300 seconds of processor time.

To increase the speed of calculation of control actions, we propose an algorithm based on artificial neural networks. As the input signal the neural network takes the components of the required displacement vector. The node values of the Lagrangian polynomials which approximately describe the control actions return as output signals . The neural network is taught by the well-known back-propagation method. The learning sample is generated using the approach based on hybrid genetic algorithms. The calculation of 1 second of the physical process by means of the neural network requires about 0.004 seconds of processor time, that is, 6 orders faster than the hybrid genetic algorithm. The control calculated by means of the artificial neural network differs from exact control. However, in spite of this difference, it ensures that the predetermined trajectory is followed exactly.

In this paper, we develop a new first-order method for composite nonconvex minimization problems with simple constraints and inexact oracle. The objective function is given as a sum of «hard», possibly nonconvex part, and «simple» convex part. Informally speaking, oracle inexactness means that, for the «hard» part, at any point we can approximately calculate the value of the function and construct a quadratic function, which approximately bounds this function from above. We give several examples of such inexactness: smooth nonconvex functions with inexact H¨older-continuous gradient, functions given by the auxiliary uniformly concave maximization problem, which can be solved only approximately. For the introduced class of problems, we propose a gradient-type method, which allows one to use a different proximal setup to adapt to the geometry of the feasible set, adaptively chooses controlled oracle error, allows for inexact proximal mapping. We provide a convergence rate for our method in terms of the norm of generalized gradient mapping and show that, in the case of an inexact Hölder-continuous gradient, our method is universal with respect to Hölder parameters of the problem. Finally, in a particular case, we show that the small value of the norm of generalized gradient mapping at a point means that a necessary condition of local minimum approximately holds at that point.

The work is devoted to the study of subgradient methods with different variations of the Polyak stepsize for minimization functions from the class of weakly convex and relatively weakly convex functions that have the corresponding analogue of a sharp minimum. It turns out that, under certain assumptions about the starting point, such an approach can make it possible to justify the convergence of the subgradient method with the speed of a geometric progression. For the subgradient method with the Polyak stepsize, a refined estimate for the rate of convergence is proved for minimization problems for weakly convex functions with a sharp minimum. The feature of this estimate is an additional consideration of the decrease of the distance from the current point of the method to the set of solutions with the increase in the number of iterations. The results of numerical experiments for the phase reconstruction problem (which is weakly convex and has a sharp minimum) are presented, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach to estimating the rate of convergence compared to the known one. Next, we propose a variation of the subgradient method with switching over productive and non-productive steps for weakly convex problems with inequality constraints and obtain the corresponding analog of the result on convergence with the rate of geometric progression. For the subgradient method with the corresponding variation of the Polyak stepsize on the class of relatively Lipschitz and relatively weakly convex functions with a relative analogue of a sharp minimum, it was obtained conditions that guarantee the convergence of such a subgradient method at the rate of a geometric progression. Finally, a theoretical result is obtained that describes the influence of the error of the information about the (sub)gradient available by the subgradient method and the objective function on the estimation of the quality of the obtained approximate solution. It is proved that for a sufficiently small error $\delta > 0$, one can guarantee that the accuracy of the solution is comparable to $\delta$.

The paper gives a detailed description of the developed methods for simulating the turbulent flow around a helicopter rotor and calculating its aerodynamic characteristics. The system of Reynolds-averaged Navier – Stokes equations for a viscous compressible gas closed by the Spalart –Allmaras turbulence model is used as the basic mathematical model. The model is formulated in a non-inertial rotating coordinate system associated with a rotor. To set the boundary conditions on the surface of the rotor, wall functions are used.

The numerical solution of the resulting system of differential equations is carried out on mixed-element unstructured grids including prismatic layers near the surface of a streamlined body.The numerical method is based on the original vertex-centered finite-volume EBR schemes. A feature of these schemes is their higher accuracy which is achieved through the use of edge-based reconstruction of variables on extended quasi-onedimensional stencils, and a moderate computational cost which allows for serial computations. The methods of Roe and Lax – Friedrichs are used as approximate Riemann solvers. The Roe method is corrected in the case of low Mach flows. When dealing with discontinuities or solutions with large gradients, a quasi-one-dimensional WENO scheme or local switching to a quasi-one-dimensional TVD-type reconstruction is used. The time integration is carried out according to the implicit three-layer second-order scheme with Newton linearization of the system of difference equations. To solve the system of linear equations, the stabilized conjugate gradient method is used.

The numerical methods are implemented as a part of the in-house code NOISEtte according to the two-level MPI–OpenMP parallel model, which allows high-performance computations on meshes consisting of hundreds of millions of nodes, while involving hundreds of thousands of CPU cores of modern supercomputers.

Based on the results of numerical simulation, the aerodynamic characteristics of the helicopter rotor are calculated, namely, trust, torque and their dimensionless coefficients.

Validation of the developed technique is carried out by simulating the turbulent flow around the Caradonna – Tung two-blade rotor and the KNRTU-KAI four-blade model rotor in hover mode mode, tail rotor in duct, and rigid main rotor in oblique flow. The numerical results are compared with the available experimental data.

The article is devoted to studying the application of convex optimization methods to solve the Cauchy problem for the Helmholtz equation, which is ill-posed since the equation belongs to the elliptic type. The Cauchy problem is formulated as an inverse problem and is reduced to a convex optimization problem in a Hilbert space. The functional to be optimized and its gradient are calculated using the solution of boundary value problems, which, in turn, are well-posed and can be approximately solved by standard numerical methods, such as finite-difference schemes and Fourier series expansions. The convergence of the applied fast gradient method and the quality of the solution obtained in this way are experimentally investigated. The experiment shows that the accelerated gradient method — the Similar Triangle Method — converges faster than the non-accelerated method. Theorems on the computational complexity of the resulting algorithms are formulated and proved. It is found that Fourier’s series expansions are better than finite-difference schemes in terms of the speed of calculations and improve the quality of the solution obtained. An attempt was made to use restarts of the Similar Triangle Method after halving the residual of the functional. In this case, the convergence does not improve, which confirms the absence of strong convexity. The experiments show that the inaccuracy of the calculations is more adequately described by the additive concept of the noise in the first-order oracle. This factor limits the achievable quality of the solution, but the error does not accumulate. According to the results obtained, the use of accelerated gradient optimization methods can be the way to solve inverse problems effectively.

Modern power transportation systems are the complex engineering systems. Such systems include both point facilities (power producers, consumers, transformer substations, etc.) and the distributed elements (f.e. power lines). Such structures are presented in the form of the graphs with different types of nodes under creating the mathematical models. It is necessary to solve the system of partial differential equations of the hyperbolic type to study the dynamic effects in such systems.

An approach similar to one already applied in modeling similar problems earlier used in the work. New variant of the splitting method was used proposed by the authors. Unlike most known works, the splitting is not carried out according to physical processes (energy transport without dissipation, separately dissipative processes). We used splitting to the transport equations with the drain and the exchange between Reimann’s invariants. This splitting makes possible to construct the hybrid schemes for Riemann invariants with a high order of approximation and minimal dissipation error. An example of constructing such a hybrid differential scheme is described for a single-phase power line. The difference scheme proposed is based on the analysis of the properties of the schemes in the space of insufficient coefficients.

Examples of the model problem numerical solutions using the proposed splitting and the difference scheme are given. The results of the numerical calculations shows that the difference scheme allows to reproduce the arising regions of large gradients. It is shown that the difference schemes also allow detecting resonances in such the systems.

Distributed saddle point problems (SPPs) have numerous applications in optimization, matrix games and machine learning. For example, the training of generated adversarial networks is represented as a min-max optimization problem, and training regularized linear models can be reformulated as an SPP as well. This paper studies distributed nonsmooth SPPs with Lipschitz-continuous objective functions. The objective function is represented as a sum of several components that are distributed between groups of computational nodes. The nodes, or agents, exchange information through some communication network that may be centralized or decentralized. A centralized network has a universal information aggregator (a server, or master node) that directly communicates to each of the agents and therefore can coordinate the optimization process. In a decentralized network, all the nodes are equal, the server node is not present, and each agent only communicates to its immediate neighbors.

We assume that each of the nodes locally holds its objective and can compute its value at given points, i. e. has access to zero-order oracle. Zero-order information is used when the gradient of the function is costly, not possible to compute or when the function is not differentiable. For example, in reinforcement learning one needs to generate a trajectory to evaluate the current policy. This policy evaluation process can be interpreted as the computation of the function value. We propose an approach that uses a smoothing technique, i. e., applies a first-order method to the smoothed version of the initial function. It can be shown that the stochastic gradient of the smoothed function can be viewed as a random two-point gradient approximation of the initial function. Smoothing approaches have been studied for distributed zero-order minimization, and our paper generalizes the smoothing technique on SPPs.