Unsteady aerodynamic modeling and analysis of aircraft model in multi-DOF coupling maneuvers at high angles of attack with attention mechanism

Unsteady aerodynamic characteristics at high angles of attack are of great importance to the design and development of advanced fighter aircraft, which are characterized by post-stall maneuverability with multiple Degrees-of-Freedom (multi-DOF) and complex flow field structure. In this paper, a special kind of cable-driven parallel mechanism is firstly utilized as a new suspension method to conduct unsteady dynamic wind tunnel tests at high angles of attack, thereby providing experimental aerodynamic data. These tests include a wide range of multi-DOF coupled oscillatory motions with various amplitudes and frequencies. Then, for aerodynamic modeling and analysis, a novel data-driven Feature-Level Attention Recurrent neural network (FLAR) is proposed. This model incorporates a specially designed feature-level attention module that focuses on the state variables affecting the aerodynamic coefficients, thereby enhancing the physical interpretability of the aerodynamic model. Subsequently, spin maneuver simulations, using a mathematical model as the baseline, are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the FLAR. Finally, the results on wind tunnel data reveal that the FLAR accurately predicts aerodynamic coefficients, and observations through the visualization of attention scores identify the key state variables that affect the aerodynamic coefficients. It is concluded that the proposed FLAR enhances the interpretability of the aerodynamic model while achieving good prediction accuracy and generalization capability for multi-DOF coupling motion at high angles of attack.