Data Driven Modeling for Aerodynamic Coefficients

Sammanfattning: Accurately modeling aerodynamic forces and moments are crucial for understanding thebehavior of an aircraft when performing various maneuvers at different flight conditions.However, this task is challenging due to complex nonlinear dependencies on manydifferent parameters. Currently, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), wind tunnel,and flight tests are the most common methods used to gather information about thecoefficients, which are both costly and time–consuming. Consequently, great efforts aremade to find alternative methods such as machine learning. This thesis focus on finding machine learning models that can model the static and thedynamic aerodynamics coefficients for lift, drag, and pitching moment. Seven machinelearning models for static estimation were trained on data from CFD simulations.The main focus was on dynamic aerodynamics since these are more difficult toestimate. Here two machine learning models were implemented, Long Short–TermMemory (LSTM) and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR), as well as the ordinaryleast squares. These models were trained on data generated from simulated flighttrajectories of longitudinal movements. The results of the study showed that it was possible to model the static coefficients withlimited data and still get high accuracy. There was no machine learning model thatperformed best for all three coefficients or with respect to the size of the training data.The Support vector regression was the best for the drag coefficients, while there wasno clear best model for the lift and moment. For the dynamic coefficients, the ordinaryleast squares performed better than expected and even better than LSTM and GPR forsome flight trajectories. The Gaussian process regression produced better results whenestimating a known trajectory, while the LSTM was better when predicting values ofa flight trajectory not used to train the models.