Accelerating aerodynamic design optimization based on graph convolutional neural network

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) plays a critical role in many scientific and engineering applications, with aerodynamic design optimization being a primary area of interest. Recently, there has been much interest in using artificial intelligence approaches to accelerate this process. One promising method is the graph convolutional neural network (GCN), a deep learning method based on artificial neural networks (ANNs). In this paper, we propose a novel GCN-based aerodynamic design optimization acceleration framework, GCN-based aerodynamic design optimization acceleration framework. The framework significantly improves processing efficiency by optimizing data flow and data representation. We also introduce a network model called GCN4CFD that uses the GCF framework to create a compact data representation of the flow field and an encoder–decoder structure to extract features. This approach enables the model to learn underlying physical laws in a space-time efficient manner. We then evaluate the proposed method on an airfoil aerodynamic design optimization task and show that GCN4CFD provides a significant speedup compared to traditional CFD solvers while maintaining accuracy. Our experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed framework and network model, achieving a speedup average of 3.0×.