Separable Shape Tensors for Aerodynamic Design

Abstract: Airfoil shape design is a classical problem in engineering and manufacturing. In this work, we combine principled physics-based considerations for the shape design problem with modern computational techniques using a data-driven approach. Modern and traditional analyses of 2D and 3D aerodynamic shapes reveal a flow-based sensitivity to specific deformations that can be represented generally by affine transformations (rotation, scaling, shearing, translation). We present a novel representation of shapes that decouples affine-style deformations over a submanifold and a product submanifold principally of the Grassmannian. As an analytic generative model, the separable representation, informed by a database of physically relevant airfoils, offers (i) a rich set of novel 2D airfoil deformations not previously captured in the data, (ii) an improved low-dimensional parameter domain for inferential statistics informing design/manufacturing, and (iii) consistent 3D blade representation and perturbation over a sequence of nominal 2D shapes.