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====== Channelflow Tutorial ======

===== Intro =====

So you've installed channelflow. Now what? Well, computational fluid
dynamics is a pretty big field, and there's no telling what kinds of
ideas you might want to explore. For this reason Channelflow was
developed primarily as a *programming language*. If you're using
Channelflow for research towards a Ph.D. thesis, you will probably
eventually end up writing your own channelflow programs, for example,
modifying existing programs to integrate flows and analyze data. Or
you might need to modify the time-integration routines to incorporate
additional physics (polymer additives, bubbles, etc.)

However, channelflow also includes a number of predefined utility
programs that a basic set of important computations, such as
time-integration of plane Couette and channel flows and measuring
properties of velocity fields. These utilities suffice for the bulk
of my own research. Probably the best way to get started with
channelflow is to step through a few examples of run-of-the-mill
calculations using these utilities. If you want to get right to these
examples, skip to Section 3.


===== Overview of channelflow utility programs =====

Here's a list of current channelflow utilities. The first three
are taken out of alphabetical order because they're featured in
Section 3, Example Calculations.

^ program name ^ purpose ^
| randomfield   | build a random initial velocity field, save to disk |
| couette       | integrate an initial condition, save results to disk |
| fieldprops    | print out norms, symmetries, geometrical data of a stored field |
| makemovie     | extract slices of fields in order to make a movie |
| addfields     | compute sum a_n u_n and store result to disk |
| arnoldi       | compute the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of eqbs and orbits |
| ascii2field   | convert a file of ASCII data to a channelflow FlowField |
| changegrid    | change the discretization or box size of a field |
| field2ascii   | convert a channelflow FlowField to a file of ASCII data |
| fieldplots    | extract a number of 2D slices of the 3D field, good for plots |
| findorbit     | compute an equilibrium or periodic orbit of plane Couette |
| L2Dist        | compute the L2 distance between two fields |
| L2IP          | compute the L2 inner product |
| makebasis     | construct an orthonormal basis from a set of fields |
| makeheatmode  | construct a field that decays in time according to Laplace eqn |
| makestokesmode | construct a stokes eigenfunction of laminar equilibrium |
| perturbfield  | add random perturbations to a given field |
| projectfields | project a set of fields onto a given basis |
| projectseries | project a sequence of fields onto a given basis |
| seriesprops   | compute statistics on a sequence of data |
| symmetrize    | find the phase shift of a field that optimizes symmetries |

The utilities are stand-alone command-line programs that are run from
the Unix shell. You can get brief built-in help information on each
utility by running it with a -h or --help option. For example, running
"couette --help" produces

  gibson@akbar$ couette --help
  couette :
        integrate an initial condition and save velocity fields to disk.

  options :
    -T0       --T0           <real>   default == 0       start time
    -T1       --T1           <real>   default == 100     end time
    -vdt      --variabledt                               adjust dt for CFL
    -dt       --dt           <real>   default == 0.03125 timestep
    -dtmin    --dtmin        <real>   default == 0.001   minimum time step
    -dtmax    --dtmax        <real>   default == 0.05    maximum time step
    -dT       --dT           <real>   default == 1       save interval
    -CFLmin   --CFLmin       <real>   default == 0.4     minimum CFL number
    -CFLmax   --CFLmax       <real>   default == 0.6     maximum CFL number
    -ts       --timestepping <string> default == sbdf3   timestepping algorithm
    ...
     -p        --pressure                                print pressure grad
    <flowfield>      (trailing arg 1)                    initial condition

The built-in help gives a brief description of each utility's purpose

and a list of its command-line options and arguments. Channelflow
utilities are invoked at the command line with syntax like

   utility -opt1 value -opt2 value -flag1 arg3 arg2 arg1

or concretely

   couette -T0 0 -T1 -vdt -dt 0.02 -ts sbdf4 u0.ff


"Options" (e.g. -opt1 value) are used to reset default values
of parameters. For options, the first two columns in the built-in
help give the short and long form of the option (e.g. -ts and
--timestepping), the third column indicates the type of parameter
expected (e.g. real, int, bool, string), and the fourth gives the
the default value. For example, "couette -dt 0.02 -ts cnab2" sets
the time stepping method to 2nd order Crank-Nicolson Adams-Bashforth
with dt=0.02.

"Flags" simply turn on boolean options that would otherwise be set
to false. For example, calling "couette -vdt" turns on variable-dt
timestepping, which adjusts dt at fixed intervals to keep the CFL
number within bounds. For flags the third and fourth columns of
built-in help are left blank.

"Arguments" always come after all options and flags. Arguments usually
specify the filenames of binary velocity fields that the utility will
load and operate on. Most channelflow programs have one required
argument (e.g. "couette u0.ff") some two (e.g. "L2Dist u0.ff u2.ff").
Others take a variable number of arguments (e.g. makebasis u0 u1 u2").
Unfortunately it's difficult to document variable-number arguments
properly in the four-column option system, so variable-number arguments
are usually documented with a "usage: line right after the description
of the utility's purpose.

So, as you read work through the Example Calculations, you can run the
suggested command with a --help option to clarify what the options are
doing and what other options are possible.


===== Example Calculations =====
==== How to make a movie of a flow ====


=== Generate an initial condition and examine its properties ===

  gibson@akbar$ randomfield -Nx 48 -Ny 35 -Nz 48 -lx 0.875 -lz 0.6 -m 0.20 u0.ff

This command generates a no-slip, divergence-free velocity field with
random spectral coefficients on a 48 x 35 x 48 grid, on [0, 2pi] x
[-1, 1] x [0, pi], with magnitude 1/V \integral_V |u|^2 dx = 0.2. The
field is a perturbation from the laminar flow --by default, velocity
fields in channelflow are differences from laminar. The spectral
coefficients are random within an exponentially decaying envelope,
roughly similar to turbulent fields. The velocity field is saved to
disk in binary format in file u0.ff (the .ff stands for "FlowField",
the name of the C++ class for velocity, pressure and tensor fields in
channelflow). The channelflow binary format stores the spectral
coefficients, the geometry, and all discretization information so the
field can be reconstructed entirely from the data in the file. You can
list this information and some dynamical properties of the field by
running

  gibson@akbar$ fieldprops u0.ff


=== Integrate a flow in time, saving the results to disk ===

  gibson@akbar$ couette -T0 0 -T1 200 -l2 -o data u0.ff

This command load the velocity field u0.ff from disk and integrates it
in time (using the default integration algorithm and parameters) from
t=T0=0 to t=T1=200, and saves the time varying velocity field to disk
at the interval dT=1.0 (the default save interval) in a directory
named data/. The -l2 option prints out the L2 norm of u as well as the
Chebyshev-weighted norm.

After this command finishes, look in the data/ directory, and you will
see u0.ff u1.ff u2.ff etc. The integer label is the time (remember the
save interval is dT=1.0). If you choose a noninteger save interval,
the filenames will be something like u0.000.ff u0.975.ff etc.


=== Extract data from the sequence of stored velocity fields for plotting ===

  gibson@akbar$ movieframes -T0 0 -T1 200 -d data -o frames

The movieframes program reads in the series of files data/u0.ff,
data/u1.ff, etc. and extracts a number of 2D slices of the 3D fields

that are good for visualizing the flow. These 2D slices are stored in
the frames/ directory with filenames like u0_yz_slice.asc.


=== Make a movie from the extracted data ===

To make a movie using channelflow's existing visualization tools, you
need Matlab. (If you would like to write similar tools for another
visualization package, please do so and send them to me!). Start up
Matlab. Get all the scripts in channelflow/matlab into your Matlab
path. Do this either by copying the scripts into the current
directory, by copying them to wherever you store your Matlab scripts,
or by putting channelflow/matlab in your Matlab path. You can do that
by typing 'addpath /home/larry/channelflow-1.3.2/matlab' at the Matlab
prompt (changing the directory as appropriate).

Then, within Matlab change to the directory that where you ran the
couette programs, the one with data/ and frames/ subdirectories.
Within Matlab run

   makemovie(0,1,200,0,1,10, 'couette.avi');

This will construct a movie of the 3D velocity field as it evolves in
time and store the result in file couette.avi, in AVI format. Running
'help makemovie' will give you a help string about the makemovie
script and its arguments; briefly, here the arguments are

  0    starting frame number
  1    frame interval
  200  ending frame number
  0    starting time (t=0.0)
  1    time interval (dT=1.0)
  10   frames per second
  'couette.avi' output filename

=== Converting the AVI file ===

Matlab produces only uncompressed AVI files on Linux. You will probably want to 
compress the AVI file and convert it to another format. On Linux you can do this with
''mencoder'', which is part of the MPlayer package. For example, this command will 
convert ''couette.avi'' file to a flash video file ''couette.flv''.

   gibson@akbar$ mencoder couette.avi -nosound -of lavf -lavopts format=flv -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vmax_b_frames=0:vbitrate=1600 -o couette.flv

Adjust the bitrate to balance filesize and video quality.

==== Project movie data onto state-space coordinates ====

It can be useful to look at the temporal evolution of a fluid as
a trajectory in state space. The number of degrees of freedom in
a fluid simulation is very high (e.g. 10^5), so it is necessary
to project the fields into a low-dimensional basis in order to
plot the trajectory and look at it. We have found that good
projection bases can be constructed from the "group orbits" of
equilibria under the symmetries of plane Couette flow. In simple
language, we take linear combinations of equilibria and their
translations in x,z to form orthonormal basis sets.

=== Make a low-d basis ===

Download an equilibrium solution of plane Couette flow from the
channelflow website, one that is compatible in geometry and
discretization.

(to be continued...)
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