Physically Interpretable Feature Learning and Inverse Design of Supercritical Airfoils

Machine-learning models have demonstrated a great ability to learn complex patterns and make predictions. In high-dimensional nonlinear problems of fluid dynamics, data representation often greatly affects the performance and interpretability of machine learning algorithms. With the increasing application of machine learning in fluid dynamics studies, the need for physically explainable models continues to grow. This paper proposes a feature learning algorithm based on variational autoencoders, which is able to assign physical features to some latent variables of the variational autoencoder. In addition, it is theoretically proved that the remaining latent variables are independent of the physical features. The proposed algorithm is trained to include shock wave features in its latent variables for the reconstruction of supercritical pressure distributions. The reconstruction accuracy and physical interpretability are also compared with those of other variational autoencoders. Then, the proposed algorithm is used for the inverse design of supercritical airfoils, which enables the generation of airfoil geometries based on physical features rather than the complete pressure distributions. It also demonstrates the ability to manipulate certain pressure distribution features of the airfoil without changing the others

Study of transfer learning from 2D supercritical airfoils to 3D transonic swept wings

Machine learning has been widely utilized in fluid mechanics studies and aerodynamic optimizations. However, most applications, especially flow field modeling and inverse design, involve two-dimensional flows and geometries. The dimensionality of three-dimensional problems is so high that it is too difficult and expensive to prepare sufficient samples. Therefore, transfer learning has become a promising approach to reuse well-trained two-dimensional models and greatly reduce the need for samples for three-dimensional problems. This paper proposes to reuse the baseline models trained on supercritical airfoils to predict finite-span swept supercritical wings, where the simple swept theory is embedded to improve the prediction accuracy. Two baseline models for transfer learning are investigated: one is commonly referred to as the forward problem of predicting the pressure coefficient distribution based on the geometry, and the other is the inverse problem that predicts the geometry based on the pressure coefficient distribution. Two transfer learning strategies are compared for both baseline models. The transferred models are then tested on the prediction of complete wings. The results show that transfer learning requires only approximately 500 wing samples to achieve good prediction accuracy on different wing planforms and different free stream conditions. Compared to the two baseline models, the transferred models reduce the prediction error by 60% and 80%, respectively

Probabilistic Results on the Architecture of Mathematical Reasoning Aligned by Cognitive Alternation

We envision a machine capable of solving mathematical problems. Dividing the quantitative reasoning system into two parts: thought processes and cognitive processes, we provide probabilistic descriptions of the architecture

Flowfield prediction of airfoil off-design conditions based on a modified variational autoencoder

Airfoil aerodynamic optimization based on single-point design may lead to poor off-design behaviors. Multipoint optimization that considers the off-design flow conditions is usually applied to improve the robustness and expand the flight envelope. Many deep learning models have been utilized for the rapid prediction or reconstruction of flowfields. However, the flowfield reconstruction accuracy may be insufficient for cruise efficiency optimization, and the model generalization ability is also questionable when facing airfoils different from the airfoils with which the model has been trained. Because a computational fluid dynamic evaluation of the cruise condition is usually necessary and affordable in industrial design, a novel deep learning framework is proposed to utilize the cruise flowfield as a prior reference for the off-design condition prediction. A prior variational autoencoder is developed to extract features from the cruise flowfield and to generate new flowfields under other free stream conditions. Physical-based loss functions based on aerodynamic force and conservation of mass are derived to minimize the prediction error of the flowfield reconstruction. The results demonstrate that the proposed model can reduce the prediction error on test airfoils by 30% compared to traditional models. The physical-based loss function can further reduce the prediction error by 4%. The proposed model illustrates a better balance of the time cost and the fidelity requirements of evaluation for cruise and off-design conditions, which makes the model more feasible for industrial applications

Fast buffet onset prediction and optimization method based on a pre-trained flowfield prediction model

The transonic buffet is a detrimental phenomenon occurs on supercritical airfoils and limits aircraft's operating envelope. Traditional methods for predicting buffet onset rely on multiple computational fluid dynamics simulations to assess a series of airfoil flowfields and then apply criteria to them, which is slow and hinders optimization efforts. This article introduces an innovative approach for rapid buffet onset prediction. A machine-learning flowfield prediction model is pre-trained on a large database and then deployed offline to replace simulations in the buffet prediction process for new airfoil designs. Unlike using a model to directly predict buffet onset, the proposed technique offers better visualization capabilities by providing users with intuitive flowfield outputs. It also demonstrates superior generalization ability, evidenced by a 32.5% reduction in average buffet onset prediction error on the testing dataset. The method is utilized to optimize the buffet performance of 11 distinct airfoils within and outside the training dataset. The optimization results are verified with simulations and proved to yield improved samples across all cases. It is affirmed the pre-trained flowfield prediction model can be applied to accelerate aerodynamic shape optimization, while further work still needs to raise its reliability for this safety-critical task.Comment: 44 pages, 20 figure

Economic web-building behavior and behavioral investment trade-offs in a cobweb spider

Web-building spiders that build detritus-based bell-shaped cobwebs are model organisms for studies on behavioral plasticity because their web architecture components are easily quantified and behavioral investments are clearly separated. We investigated the web architectures and behavioral investments of the cobwebs built by Campanicola campanulata under different weight (heavy, medium, and light) detritus to research its cobweb architecture variation and analyzed the investment trade-off between foraging and defense. The results showed that spiders could actively choose lighter detritus to build retreats to reduce material and energy cost. There was a clear trade-off between defense and foraging investment of spiders choosing different weight detritus for their webs. The total length of gumfooted lines (foraging investment) was longer for the spiders that chose lighter detritus, but the energy expenditure during web-building (defense investment) was higher for the spiders that chose heavier detritus

BENO: Boundary-embedded Neural Operators for Elliptic PDEs

Elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) are a major class of time-independent PDEs that play a key role in many scientific and engineering domains such as fluid dynamics, plasma physics, and solid mechanics. Recently, neural operators have emerged as a promising technique to solve elliptic PDEs more efficiently by directly mapping the input to solutions. However, existing networks typically cannot handle complex geometries and inhomogeneous boundary values present in the real world. Here we introduce Boundary-Embedded Neural Operators (BENO), a novel neural operator architecture that embeds the complex geometries and inhomogeneous boundary values into the solving of elliptic PDEs. Inspired by classical Green's function, BENO consists of two branches of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for interior source term and boundary values, respectively. Furthermore, a Transformer encoder maps the global boundary geometry into a latent vector which influences each message passing layer of the GNNs. We test our model extensively in elliptic PDEs with various boundary conditions. We show that all existing baseline methods fail to learn the solution operator. In contrast, our model, endowed with boundary-embedded architecture, outperforms state-of-the-art neural operators and strong baselines by an average of 60.96\%. Our source code can be found https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/beno.git.Comment: Accepted by ICLR 202