SuperWing: a comprehensive transonic wing dataset for data-driven aerodynamic design
This provides a valuable dataset for researchers in aerodynamic design, enabling more generalizable machine-learning models, though it is incremental as it builds on existing surrogate modeling approaches.
The authors tackled the lack of diverse datasets for data-driven aerodynamic design by creating SuperWing, a comprehensive open dataset of 4,239 wing geometries and 28,856 flow solutions, and demonstrated its utility with Transformers achieving a 2.5 drag-count error and strong zero-shot generalization to complex benchmark wings.
Machine-learning surrogate models have shown promise in accelerating aerodynamic design, yet progress toward generalizable predictors for three-dimensional wings has been limited by the scarcity and restricted diversity of existing datasets. Here, we present SuperWing, a comprehensive open dataset of transonic swept-wing aerodynamics comprising 4,239 parameterized wing geometries and 28,856 Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes flow field solutions. The wing shapes in the dataset are generated using a simplified yet expressive geometry parameterization that incorporates spanwise variations in airfoil shape, twist, and dihedral, allowing for an enhanced diversity without relying on perturbations of a baseline wing. All shapes are simulated under a broad range of Mach numbers and angles of attack covering the typical flight envelope. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we benchmark two state-of-the-art Transformers that accurately predict surface flow and achieve a 2.5 drag-count error on held-out samples. Models pretrained on SuperWing further exhibit strong zero-shot generalization to complex benchmark wings such as DLR-F6 and NASA CRM, underscoring the dataset's diversity and potential for practical usage.