AbbottAE: An Autoencoder for Airfoil Aerodynamics

An autoencoder is trained to reproduce the aerodynamic characteristics of wing sections (2D airfoils). The formulation is based on an adaptive training database that minimize the data required while preserving the accuracy of the solutions. The autoencoder uses aggressive compression (small latent dimension) to mimic the independent variables used to define the database. The latent space is interpolated using Radial Basis Functions with a cubic kernel to generate synthetic flow fields on unseen airfoils. The accuracy of the results and the interpretation of the latent space are based on comparisons with simulations.