Full-field prediction for engineering-scale three-dimensional aircraft with multigrid-hierarchical learning
This work provides a practical method for accelerating high-fidelity 3D aircraft flow simulations, which are crucial for aerospace design, by reducing the computational expense for engineers.
The authors developed MHLF, a multigrid-hierarchical learning framework, to accelerate high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations for engineering-scale 3D aircraft. MHLF achieved a 3 to 8 times efficiency improvement in convergence over conventional initialization across various flight regimes (Mach 0.15 to 6.0) without sacrificing accuracy.
High-fidelity computational fluid dynamics is essential for aerospace design, but engineering-scale simulations of practical three-dimensional aircraft remain computationally expensive. Learning-based flow-field initialization can improve efficiency by reducing the numerical distance between the initial and converged solutions, yet existing deep learning approaches remain difficult to scale to large three-dimensional aircraft flows with multiscale regional heterogeneity. Most prior studies therefore focus on two-dimensional problems, surface quantities, integral aerodynamic coefficients, or simplified three-dimensional cases with limited grid resolution.Here we propose MHLF, a multigrid-hierarchical learning framework for accelerating engineering-scale aircraft flow simulations while preserving high-fidelity numerical accuracy. MHLF combines a topologically consistent geometric multigrid representation with a hierarchical strategy that captures regional flow heterogeneity during both prediction and subsequent CFD correction. Across three engineering-scale aircraft cases spanning Mach 0.15 to 6.0 and covering subsonic, transonic and supersonic regimes, MHLF accelerates convergence without sacrificing flow-field accuracy, achieving a 3 to 8 times efficiency improvement over conventional initialization. These results demonstrate practical full-flow-field prediction for large three-dimensional aircraft within the CFD domain and provide a foundation for data-driven acceleration of high-fidelity aircraft flow simulation.