Periodic Neural Mapping for Unsteady Rotor-Blade Pressure and Aeroelastic Load Prediction

Abstract

Accurate prediction of unsteady aerodynamic loads remains a major challenge in turbomachinery design. High-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are expensive, while aeroelastic Quantities of Interest (QoI) depend sensitively on the temporal evolution of the pressure field. This work introduces periodic Fourier Neural Mapping (p-FNM), a neural-operator framework for predicting unsteady pressure distributions on turbine rotor blades simulated using the chorochronic numerical hypothesis. The architecture embeds temporal periodicity into the model and learns a continuous mapping from operating conditions and time to pressure fields. Unlike sequential latent-space approaches, p-FNM predicts pressure fields independently at any time, avoiding error accumulation while preserving temporal continuity. The model is evaluated on a database of unsteady rotor-blade simulations and compared with a reduced-order baseline based on a variational autoencoder and recurrent neural network, refered as the Temporal Prediction Model (TPM). Performance is assessed for pressure fields and Generalized Aerodynamic Forces (GAFs), the primary aeroelastic QoI. Across all training datasets, p-FNM consistently outperforms TPM. On the largest dataset, p-FNM achieves a pressure-field mean absolute percentage error of 0.46% and a GAF-magnitude prediction error of 4.42%, corresponding to improvements of 60.7% and 77.6%, respectively. The minimum weighted phase error reaches 0.060 rad, demonstrating accurate preservation of the temporal characteristics of the aerodynamic response. The results show that GAF prediction is more challenging than pressure-field prediction and that temporal coherence is critical for accurately predicting spectral aerodynamic quantities. These findings demonstrate the potential of periodic neural operators for reduced-order modeling and aeroelastic analysis in turbomachinery.