We consider time-average quantities of chaotic systems and their sensitivity to system parameters. When the parameters are random variables with a prescribed probability density function, the sensitivities are also random. The central aim of the paper is to study and quantify the uncertainty of the sensitivities; this is useful to know in robust design applications. To this end, we couple the nonintrusive polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) with the multiple shooting shadowing (MSS) method, and apply the coupled method to two standard chaotic systems, the Lorenz system and the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. The method leads to accurate results that match well with Monte Carlo simulations (even for low chaos orders, at least for the two systems examined), but it is costly. However, if we apply the concept of shadowing to the system trajectories evaluated at the quadrature integration points of PCE, then the resulting regularization can lead to significant computational savings. We call the new method shadowed PCE (sPCE).

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In this paper, we consider the effect of stochastic uncertainties on non-linear systems with chaotic behavior. More specifically, we quantify the effect of parametric uncertainties to time-averaged quantities and their sensitivities. Sampling methods for Uncertainty Quantification (UQ), such as the Monte–Carlo (MC), are very costly, while traditional methods for sensitivity analysis, such as the adjoint, fail in chaotic systems. In this work, we employ the non-intrusive generalized Polynomial Chaos (gPC) for UQ, coupled with the Multiple-Shooting Shadowing (MSS) algorithm for sensitivity analysis of chaotic systems. It is shown that the gPC, coupled with MSS, is an appropriate method for conducting UQ in chaotic systems and produces results that match well with those from MC and Finite-Differences (FD).

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We present an enriched formulation of the Least Squares (LSQ) regression method for Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) using generalised polynomial chaos (gPC). More specifically, we enrich the linear system with additional equations for the gradient (or sensitivity) of the Quantity of Interest with respect to the stochastic variables. This sensitivity is computed very efficiently for all variables by solving an adjoint system of equations at each sampling point of the stochastic space. The associated computational cost is similar to one solution of the direct problem. For the selection of the sampling points, we apply a greedy algorithm which is based on the pivoted QR decomposition of the measurement matrix. We call the new approach sensitivity-enhanced generalised polynomial chaos, or se-gPC. We apply the method to several test cases to test accuracy and convergence with increasing chaos order, including an aerodynamic case with 40 stochastic parameters. The method is found to produce accurate estimations of the statistical moments using the minimum number of sampling points. The computational cost scales as ∼ m p−1 , instead of ∼ m p of the standard LSQ formulation, where m is the number of stochastic variables and p the chaos order. The solution of the adjoint system of equations is implemented in many computational mechanics packages, thus the infrastructure exists for the application of the method to a wide variety of engineering problems.