Investigation on the abilities of different artificial intelligence methods to predict the aerodynamic coefficients.

The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations at different fidelity levels are a common tool for predicting the aerodynamic performance in many engineering applications such as; automotive and aerospace to cite a few. However, the associated computational costs with these simulations are not trivial, and using the CFD simulations might easily become unpractical specially at the early design stages. The number of the required CFD simulations could be reduced immensely by using Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods which can predict, for example, the aerodynamic coefficients based on previous and limited CFD simulations. Having discussed the AI potential to minimize the CFD usage, the objective of this work is to investigate and compare the ability of different AI methods to predict the aerodynamic coefficients using the same CFD database from the literature. In this study, three different AI methods, namely; machine learning (e.g. Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB), CatBoost, Bagging, Light Gradient Boosting Machine (Light-GBM), Random Forest (RFR), Gradient Boosting), deep learning (e.g. One Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (Conv1D)) and surrogate models (e.g. Gaussian Process Regression (GPR)) have been utilized to estimate a sample CFD database (e.g. NACA0012, RAE2822) from the existing literature, and the prediction performance of these methods have been compared. The results show that, the aerodynamic coefficients predicted using CatBoost, XGB and Bagging are in good agreement with the reference CFD results. Furthermore, the proposed Conv1D method with LeakyReLU activation function showed a promising results in the development of aerodynamic models which can be used in the early stages of the air vehicles design. The obtained results from this work indicate that the CatBoost and the XGB models required much smaller training time compared to the Conv1D method, moreover, the proposed regression trees; CatBoost, Bagging and XGB can reduce the required number of CFD simulations significantly. • Various artificial intelligence methods were studied to predict aerodynamic data. • Regression tree models such as XGB, Catboost and LightGBM were used. • Surrogate models and deep learning models (i.e. Conv1D) also were used. • Detailed comparison were presented between the aforementioned models. • The paper suggests the suitability of XGB and Catboost for aerodynamics cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]