Constructing Low-Dimensional Dynamical Systems of Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations Using Optimization

A new approach using optimization technique for constructing low-dimensional dynamical systems of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) is presented. After the spatial basis functions of the nonlinear PDEs are chosen, spatial basis functions expansions combined with weighted residual methods are used for time/space separation and truncation to obtain a high-dimensional dynamical system. Secondly, modes of lower-dimensional dynamical systems are obtained by linear combination from the modes of the high-dimensional dynamical systems (ordinary differential equations) of nonlinear PDEs. An error function for matrix of the linear combination coefficients is derived, and a simple algorithm to determine the optimal combination matrix is also introduced. A numerical example shows that the optimal dynamical system can use much smaller number of modes to capture the dynamics of nonlinear partial differential equations.