Topological colouring of fluid particles unravels finite-time coherent sets

Abstract

This work describes the application of a technique that extracts branched manifolds from time series to study numerically generated fluid particle behaviour in the wake past a cylinder performing a rotary oscillation at low Reynolds numbers, and compares it with the results obtained for a paradigmatic analytical model of Lagrangian motion: the driven double gyre. The approach does not require prior knowledge of the underlying equations defining the dataset. The time series taken as input corresponds to the evolution of a position coordinate of an individual fluid particle. A delay embedding is used to reconstruct the dynamics in phase space, and a cell complex is built to characterize the topology of the embedding. Fluid particles are said to belong to the same topological class when the Betti numbers, orientability chains and weak boundaries of the associated cell complexes coincide. Topological colouring consists of labelling or 'colouring' advected particles with the topological class obtained in their finite-time analyses. The results suggest that topological colouring can be used to distinguish between regions of the flow where trajectories exhibit different finite-time dynamics.