Sensitivity of Lagrangian coherent structure identification to flow field resolution and random errors.

The effect of spatial and temporal resolutions and random errors on identification of Lagrangian coherent structures (LCSs) from Eulerian velocity fields is evaluated using two canonical flows: a two-dimensional vortex pair and a vortex ring formed by transient ejection of a jet from a tube. The flow field for the vortex pair case was steady and obtained analytically while the transient vortex ring flow was simulated using computational fluid dynamics. To evaluate resolution and random error effects, the flow fields were degraded by locally smoothing the flow and sampling it on a sparser grid to reduce spatial resolution, adding Gaussian distributed random noise to provide random errors, and/or subsampling the time series of vector fields to reduce the temporal resolution (the latter applying only for the vortex ring case). The degradation methods were meant to emulate distortions and errors introduced in common flow measurement methods such as digital particle image velocimetry. Comparing the LCS corresponding to the vortex boundary (separatrix) obtained from the degraded velocity fields with the true separatrix (obtained analytically for the vortex pair case or from high resolution, noise-free velocity fields for the vortex ring case) showed that noise levels as low as 5%-10% of the vortex velocity can cause the separatrix to significantly deviate from its true location in a random fashion, but the "mean" location still remained close to the true location. Temporal and spatial resolution degradations were found to primarily affect transient portions of the flow with strong spatial gradients. Significant deviations in the location of the separatrix were observed even for spatial resolutions as high as 2% of the jet diameter for the vortex ring case.