Surrogate modeling of unsteady aerodynamic loads acting on a plunging airfoil

Summary

Cost-effective parameteric surrogate models of unsteady aerodynamic loads acting on a flapping wing are highly desirable. They would enable real time aerodynamic load prediction, multiobjective optimisation and optimal control of intelligent flapping wing flight devices. In the present work, a parametric surrogate modeling framework for unsteady aerodynamic loads based on a non-intrusive reduced order modeling approach is presented. The unsteady flow past a plunging 2D flat plate is considered where the aerodynamic load time histories are obtained for different plunging frequencies and amplitudes using a potential flow solver. The parametric non-intrusive reduced order model (p-NIROM) for the obtained loads is constructed using a combination of snapshot proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) for dimensionality reduction and a fully connected feed forward neural network (FCNN) for modeling the input parametric dependency. Both, linear and non-linear FCNN based p-NIROM are explored and compared on the basis of load time history reconstruction accuracy. The non-linear FCNN regression for the p-NIROM is observed to generalise well for unseen parametric instances as compared to the linear approach when a systematic data sampling strategy is adopted.

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