Learning Mappings from Iced Airfoils to Aerodynamic Coefficients Using a Deep Operator Network

This study abstracted the prediction of the aerodynamic coefficients of an iced airfoil as a mapping from the iced airfoil space to the aerodynamic coefficient space. Thus, a deep network called Airfoils2AeroNet that can learn this mapping was established based on Deep Operator Network (DeepONet). The deep network consists of a branch network for encoding the iced airfoil images and a trunk network that learns a nonlinear mapping from the one-dimensional aerodynamic coefficient function input to p-dimensional outputs. The branch network consists of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and the trunk network consists of fully connected neural networks (FNNs). Then the network was trained and tested on iced airfoils based on NACA 0012 airfoils. Comparing the prediction results of Airfoils2AeroNet with those of the conventional direct CNN network, the network proposed in this paper has a strong advantage for generalization. Unlike the traditional CNN, which can only predict the aerodynamic coefficients at fixed flow conditions consistent with the training data, the network can flexibly predict the aerodynamic coefficients at different flow conditions. Finally, the influence of the structure of the branch network and trunk network on the prediction results was analyzed.