arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

Airfoil2Vec: Spectral Geometry-Conditioned Neural Surrogate Models for Airfoil Aerodynamics and a Downforce-Generating CFD Dataset

The paper presents a dataset of roughly 10,000 RANS simulations of steady, incompressible, two‑dimensional subsonic flow around downforce‑generating NACA 4‑digit airfoils, aimed at automotive and motorsport regimes. It explores geometry‑conditioned neural surrogates—comparing neural fields, neural ODEs, MLPs, graph models, and spectral conditioning—and introduces Airfoil2Vec, a spectral geometry encoder that fuses joint contour, camber, and thickness spectra to predict continuous pressure and velocity fields. The surrogate models are evaluated on angle‑of‑attack interpolation, unseen NACA geometries, and non‑NACA airfoils, achieving accurate aerodynamic predictions with orders‑of‑magnitude speedups over traditional CFD.

By Haitz S\'aez de Oc\'ariz Borde, Flavio Savarino, Andrei Cristian Popescu, Pietro Innocenzi, Pantelis Papageorgiou, Xerxes Xian Chong