Shocks Under Control: Taming Transonic Compressible Flow over an RAE2822 Airfoil with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mondal, Trishit, Vinuesa, Ricardo, Jagtap, Ameya D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mondal, Trishit
Vinuesa, Ricardo
Jagtap, Ameya D.
author_facet Mondal, Trishit
Vinuesa, Ricardo
Jagtap, Ameya D.
contents Active flow control of compressible transonic shock-boundary layer interactions over a two-dimensional RAE2822 airfoil at Re = 50,000 is investigated using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The flow field exhibits highly unsteady dynamics, including complex shock-boundary layer interactions, shock oscillations, and the generation of Kutta waves from the trailing edge. A high-fidelity CFD solver, employing a fifth-order spectral discontinuous Galerkin scheme in space and a strong-stability-preserving Runge-Kutta (5,4) method in time, together with adaptive mesh refinement capability, is used to obtain the accurate flow field. Synthetic jet actuation is employed to manipulate these unsteady flow features, while the DRL agent autonomously discovers effective control strategies through direct interaction with high-fidelity compressible flow simulations. The trained controllers effectively mitigate shock-induced separation, suppress unsteady oscillations, and manipulate aerodynamic forces under transonic conditions. In the first set of experiments, aimed at both drag reduction and lift enhancement, the DRL-based control reduces the average drag coefficient by 13.78% and increases lift by 131.18%, thereby improving the lift-to-drag ratio by 121.52%, which underscores its potential for managing complex flow dynamics. In the second set, targeting drag reduction while maintaining lift, the DRL-based control achieves a 25.62% reduction in drag and a substantial 196.30% increase in lift, accompanied by markedly diminished oscillations. In this case, the lift-to-drag ratio improves by 220.26%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07564
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Shocks Under Control: Taming Transonic Compressible Flow over an RAE2822 Airfoil with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Mondal, Trishit
Vinuesa, Ricardo
Jagtap, Ameya D.
Fluid Dynamics
Machine Learning
Active flow control of compressible transonic shock-boundary layer interactions over a two-dimensional RAE2822 airfoil at Re = 50,000 is investigated using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The flow field exhibits highly unsteady dynamics, including complex shock-boundary layer interactions, shock oscillations, and the generation of Kutta waves from the trailing edge. A high-fidelity CFD solver, employing a fifth-order spectral discontinuous Galerkin scheme in space and a strong-stability-preserving Runge-Kutta (5,4) method in time, together with adaptive mesh refinement capability, is used to obtain the accurate flow field. Synthetic jet actuation is employed to manipulate these unsteady flow features, while the DRL agent autonomously discovers effective control strategies through direct interaction with high-fidelity compressible flow simulations. The trained controllers effectively mitigate shock-induced separation, suppress unsteady oscillations, and manipulate aerodynamic forces under transonic conditions. In the first set of experiments, aimed at both drag reduction and lift enhancement, the DRL-based control reduces the average drag coefficient by 13.78% and increases lift by 131.18%, thereby improving the lift-to-drag ratio by 121.52%, which underscores its potential for managing complex flow dynamics. In the second set, targeting drag reduction while maintaining lift, the DRL-based control achieves a 25.62% reduction in drag and a substantial 196.30% increase in lift, accompanied by markedly diminished oscillations. In this case, the lift-to-drag ratio improves by 220.26%.
title Shocks Under Control: Taming Transonic Compressible Flow over an RAE2822 Airfoil with Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Fluid Dynamics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07564