Unsteady aerodynamic modeling at high angles of attack using support vector machines

Accurate aerodynamic models are the basis of flight simulation and control law design. Mathematically modeling unsteady aerodynamics at high angles of attack bears great difficulties in model structure determination and parameter estimation due to little understanding of the flow mechanism. Support vector machines (SVMs) based on statistical learning theory provide a novel tool for nonlinear system modeling. The work presented here examines the feasibility of applying SVMs to high angle-of-attack unsteady aerodynamic modeling field. Mainly, after a review of SVMs, several issues associated with unsteady aerodynamic modeling by use of SVMs are discussed in detail, such as selection of input variables, selection of output variables and determination of SVM parameters. The least squares SVM (LS-SVM) models are set up from certain dynamic wind tunnel test data of a delta wing and an aircraft configuration, and then used to predict the aerodynamic responses in other tests. The predictions are in good agreement with the test data, which indicates the satisfying learning and generalization performance of LS-SVMs.