Dynamical Systems Lab (DSL), led by Prof. Piyush Grover in Mechanical and Materials Engineering (MME) at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, focusses on modeling and analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems with an eye on design, control and optimization for engineering applications. Our current focus is on active fluids, mean-field control, mean-field games and nonlinear waves in mechanical metamaterials.
- Nov 2023: "Exploring regular and turbulent flow states in active nematic channel flow via Exact Coherent Structures and their invariant manifolds" is published in Physical Review Fluids
- July 2023: UNL News article about our DEPSCoR award.
- May 2023: Two talks at SIAM Conference on Dynamical Systems by graduate students Ali and Mohammed.
- May 2023: A new award from DoD will support our research on defect engineering of nonlinear wave propagation in bistable metamaterials
- May 2023: New preprint "Exploring regular and turbulent flow states in active nematic channel flow via Exact Coherent Structures and their invariant manifolds" led by Caleb Wagner.
- March 2023: Three talks at APS March meeting, by Ph.D. students Mohammed A. Mohammed, and Rumayel Pallock, as well as our collaborator Dr. Mike Norton of RIT.
- Oct 2022: New preprint "Mechanochemical topological defects in an active nematic" with Mike Norton.
- July 2022: New preprint "Phase space analysis of nonlinear wave propagation in a bistable mechanical metamaterial with a defect", led by Ph.D. student Mohammed A. Mohammed. See our USNC/TAM presentation here. Update: Now published in Physical Review E, here
- June 2022: Two presentations at USNC/TAM 2022 in Austin. One talk on ECS in active nematics, and another on nonlinear wave propagation in bistable metamaterials.
- April 2022: Presentation at UNL Math Club
- April 2022: MME Graduate seminar presentation titled "From celestial mechanics to active hydrodynamics: hitchhiking on invariant manifolds through chaos in finite and infinite dimensions"
- March 2022: New Article "Robust preconditioned one-shot methods and direct-adjoint-looping for optimising Reynolds-averaged turbulent flows" in Computers and Fluids.
- Feb 2022: Caleb Wagner presented in UC Merced's SLAAM seminar. Watch the recording here.
- Jan 2022: DSL work highlighted in PRL as Editor's Suggestion
- Dec 2021: New Article "Co-design of reduced-order models and observers from thermo-fluid data" in IFAC Journal of Systems and Control.
- Nov 2021: See our research covered by UNL Engineering : From bacteria to robot swarms to mixed traffic: Researchers developing new algorithms for controlling collective behavior
- Nov 2021: Upcoming talk at APS DFD 2021 by Caleb Wagner, and video @ APS Gallery of Fluids.
- Oct 2021 : Upcoming Brandeis MRSEC Seminar, as well as Brandeis Physics Colloqium.
- Sept 2021 : New DOE Basic Energy Science award will support our research on nonlinear dynamics and control of active fluids using exact coherent structures framework.
- Sept 2021 : New preprint: Exact coherent structures and phase space geometry of pre-turbulent 2D active nematic channel flow. See videos here. Published in Physical Review Letters
- July 2021 : New NSF CMMI DCSD award will support our research on bifurcations and phase space analysis of Mean field games and mean field control problems
- July 2021: Invited talk at Active matter workshop @ Telluride Science Research Center, Colorado.
- July 2021: Ph.D. Position: We are looking for a Ph.D. student in the area of active fluids. Please email me with any inquiries.
- June 2021: Upcoming talks at: Midwest Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics Workshop, and ICRA workshop on nano and micro-robots.
- May 2021: 3 Talks at SIAM Dynamical Systems Conference: On Mean field games, Exact coherent structures in active nematics, and control of active nematics
- March 2021: Caleb presented work on Exact Coherent Structures in active nematics at APS
- Oct 2020: Our paper Optimal Control of Active Nematics is highlighted in Physical Review Letters as Editor's Suggestion.
- Sept 2020: Paper with colleagues from Georgia Tech, accepted at Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2020) 'Stabilizing Optimal Density Control of Nonlinear Agents with Multiplicative Noise'. Preprint coming soon.
- August 2020: Caleb Wagner will join the group as a postdoctoral researcher, after finishing his Ph.D. in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics at Brandeis University.
- July 2020: Check out our new preprint "Optimal Control of Active Nematics" with Mike Norton and collaborators. Accepted at Physical Review Letters (9/18)
- May 2020: New undergraduate online course "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos' will be offered during 8 week summer session (MECH 98-401, May 18-July 10). Sign up now to learn about this exciting topic.
- April 2020: Our paper 'Optimization-based incentivization and control scheme for autonomous traffic' with Uros Kalabic (MERL) and Shuchin Aeron (Tufts) on PDE based optimal control of mixed manual-autonomous traffic accepted to IEEE Intelligent Vehicles 2020. Preprint here
- Feb 2020: Joint work with Mike Norton on optimal control of active nematics will be presented by Mike at the APS March Meeting.
- Jan 2020: Paper accepted at American Control Conference (ACC 2020) with colleagues from MERL and Univ. Minnesota on robust estimation of airflow in buildings. Preprint forthcoming.
- Nov 2019: Conference APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting Nov 2019: 2 Talks with collaborators from MERL and Univ. Cambridge.
- Nov 2019: Presented work on mean-field games at UNL Math Department's Continuum Mechanics Seminar
- Oct 2019: New poster on LiDAR based data assimilimation.
- Oct 2019: A new postdoctoral position is available. See ad here.
- Sept 2019: New paper with colleagues from MERL and Univ. Cambridge on optimal control of airflow in buildings.
- August 2019: DSL is established. We are looking for undergraduate and graduate students to join the lab.
- July 2019: Workshop Particulate and Granular Networks, Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany
- June 2019:Workshop Crowds: Models and Control workshop, CIRM, Marseille, France
- May 2019: Conference SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems, Snowbird, Utah. Presented a talk on MFG based flocking models and their stability analysis.
Areas of Research
Dynamical Systems theory, reduced-order modeling, control and optimization with applications to:
- Microfluidics and active fluids (chaotic mixing, topological chaos, flow control)
- Large-scale multi-agent systems (swarm robotics, traffic) via mean-field games and mean-field control theory
- Energy transfers and wave propagation in nonlinear metamaterials and achitectured materials
- Atmospheric Flows (Reduced-order modeling , LiDAR data-assimilation)
- Astrodynamics (Low-energy space mission design)
- Buoyancy driven flow in built environment (control of HVAC)
Funded by:
- NSF CMMI DCSD 2102112 (PI:Grover)
- DOE BES Biomolecular materials DE-SC0022280 (PI:Grover, Co-Is:Jae Sung Park, Michael M. Norton)
- DoD/AFOSR DEPSCoR (PI:Grover, co-PI: Keegan Moore (UNL))
- Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs