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Main Authors: Vatani, Parsa, Elrefaie, Mohamed, Nazarpour, Farhad, Ahmed, Faez
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12224
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author Vatani, Parsa
Elrefaie, Mohamed
Nazarpour, Farhad
Ahmed, Faez
author_facet Vatani, Parsa
Elrefaie, Mohamed
Nazarpour, Farhad
Ahmed, Faez
contents The computational cost of traditional Computational Fluid Dynamics-based Aerodynamic Shape Optimization severely restricts design space exploration. This paper introduces TripOptimizer, a fully differentiable deep learning framework for rapid aerodynamic analysis and shape optimization directly from vehicle point cloud data. TripOptimizer employs a Variational Autoencoder featuring a triplane-based implicit neural representation for high-fidelity 3D geometry reconstruction and a drag coefficient prediction head. Trained on DrivAerNet++, a large-scale dataset of 8,000 unique vehicle geometries with corresponding drag coefficients computed via Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes simulations, the model learns a latent representation that encodes aerodynamically salient geometric features. We propose an optimization strategy that modifies a subset of the encoder parameters to steer an initial geometry towards a target drag value, and demonstrate its efficacy in case studies where optimized designs achieved drag coefficient reductions up to 11.8\%. These results were subsequently validated by using independent, high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations with more than 150 million cells. A key advantage of the implicit representation is its inherent robustness to geometric imperfections, enabling optimization of non-watertight meshes, a significant challenge for traditional adjoint-based methods. The framework enables a more agile Aerodynamic Shape Optimization workflow, reducing reliance on computationally intensive CFD simulations, especially during early design stages.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12224
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TripOptimizer: Generative 3D Shape Optimization and Drag Prediction using Triplane VAE Networks
Vatani, Parsa
Elrefaie, Mohamed
Nazarpour, Farhad
Ahmed, Faez
Machine Learning
The computational cost of traditional Computational Fluid Dynamics-based Aerodynamic Shape Optimization severely restricts design space exploration. This paper introduces TripOptimizer, a fully differentiable deep learning framework for rapid aerodynamic analysis and shape optimization directly from vehicle point cloud data. TripOptimizer employs a Variational Autoencoder featuring a triplane-based implicit neural representation for high-fidelity 3D geometry reconstruction and a drag coefficient prediction head. Trained on DrivAerNet++, a large-scale dataset of 8,000 unique vehicle geometries with corresponding drag coefficients computed via Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes simulations, the model learns a latent representation that encodes aerodynamically salient geometric features. We propose an optimization strategy that modifies a subset of the encoder parameters to steer an initial geometry towards a target drag value, and demonstrate its efficacy in case studies where optimized designs achieved drag coefficient reductions up to 11.8\%. These results were subsequently validated by using independent, high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations with more than 150 million cells. A key advantage of the implicit representation is its inherent robustness to geometric imperfections, enabling optimization of non-watertight meshes, a significant challenge for traditional adjoint-based methods. The framework enables a more agile Aerodynamic Shape Optimization workflow, reducing reliance on computationally intensive CFD simulations, especially during early design stages.
title TripOptimizer: Generative 3D Shape Optimization and Drag Prediction using Triplane VAE Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12224