Machine-Learning for Nonintrusive Model Order Reduction of the Parametric Inviscid Transonic Flow past an airfoil

Abstract: Fluid flow in the transonic regime finds relevance in aerospace engineering, particularly in the design of commercial air transportation vehicles. Computational fluid dynamics models of transonic flow for aerospace applications are computationally expensive to solve because of the high degrees of freedom as well as the coupled nature of the conservation laws. While these issues pose a bottleneck for the use of such models in aerospace design, computational costs can be significantly minimized by constructing special, structure-preserving surrogate models called reduced-order models. Such models are known to incur huge off-line costs, however, which can sometimes outweigh their potential benefits. Furthermore, their prediction accuracy is known to be poor under transonic flow conditions. In this work, we propose a machine learning method to construct reduced-order models via deep neural networks, and we demonstrate its ability to preserve accuracy with significantly lower offline and online costs. In addition, our machine learning methodology is physics-informed and constrained through the utilization of an interpretable encoding by way of proper orthogonal decomposition. Application to the inviscid transonic flow past the RAE2822 airfoil under varying freestream Mach numbers and angles of attack, as well as airfoil shape parameters with a deforming mesh, shows that the proposed approach adapts to high-dimensional parameter variation well. Notably, the proposed framework precludes knowledge of numerical operators utilized in the data generation phase, thereby demonstrating its potential utility in fast exploration of design space for diverse engineering applications.