Route to Chaos in the Fluidic Pinball

Abstract

The fluidic pinball has been recently proposed as an attractive and effective flow configuration for exploring machine learning fluid flow control. In this contribution, we focus on the route to chaos in this system without actuation, as the Reynolds number is smoothly increased. It was found to be of the Newhouse-Ruelle-Takens kind, with a secondary pitchfork bifurcation that breaks the symmetry of the mean flow field on the route to quasi-periodicity.