Compact representation of transonic airfoil buffet flows with observable-augmented machine learning

Transonic buffet presents time-dependent aerodynamic characteristics associated with shock, turbulent boundary layer, and their interactions. Despite strong nonlinearities and a large degree of freedom, there exists a dominant dynamic pattern of a buffet cycle, suggesting the low dimensionality of transonic buffet phenomena. This study seeks a low-dimensional representation of transonic airfoil buffet at a high Reynolds number with machine learning. Wall-modeled large-eddy simulations of flow over the OAT15A supercritical airfoil at two Mach numbers, $M_\infty = 0.715$ and 0.730, respectively producing non-buffet and buffet conditions, at a chord-based Reynolds number of $Re = 3\times 10^6$ are performed to generate the present datasets. We find that the low-dimensional nature of transonic airfoil buffet can be extracted as a sole three-dimensional latent representation through lift-augmented autoencoder compression. The current low-order representation not only describes the shock movement but also captures the moment when the separation occurs near the trailing edge in a low-order manner. We further show that it is possible to perform sensor-based reconstruction through the present low-dimensional expression while identifying the sensitivity with respect to aerodynamic responses. The present model trained at $Re = 3\times 10^6$ is lastly evaluated at the level of a real aircraft operation of $Re = 3\times 10^7$, exhibiting that the phase dynamics of lift is reasonably estimated from sparse sensors. The current study may provide a foundation toward data-driven real-time analysis of transonic buffet conditions under aircraft operation.

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