Joint Reduced Model for the Laminar and Chaotic Attractors in Plane Couette Flow

Abstract

We use the theory of spectral submanifolds (SSMs) to develop a low-dimensional reduced-order model for plane Couette flow in the permanently chaotic regime studied by Kreilos & Eckhardt (2012). Our three-dimensional model is obtained by restricting the dynamics to the slowest mixed-mode SSM of the edge state. We show that this results in a nonlinear model that accurately reconstructs individual trajectories, representing the entire chaotic attractor and the laminar dynamics simultaneously. In addition, we derive a two-dimensional Poincar\'e map that enables the rapid computation of the periodic orbits embedded in the chaotic attractor.