AIAA JOURNAL

Vol. 57, No. 12, December 2019

Machine-Learning-Based Detection of Aerodynamic Disturbances

Using Surface Pressure Measurements

Wei Hou,∗ Darwin Darakananda,† and Jeff D. Eldredge‡

University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095
DOI: 10.2514/1.J058486
Aerodynamic disturbances (due to gusts, maneuvers, or a combination) leave a signature in the pressures exerted
on the wing surface. In this work, the following question is explored: To what extent can the characteristics of these
disturbances be parsed from the measured pressures alone? A supervised learning algorithm based on several layers
of neural networks is applied. The overall machine-learning architecture is trained and tested on aerodynamic
disturbance data generated by an inviscid vortex method applied to a two-dimensional flat plate undergoing a smooth
pitchup maneuver. As a surrogate for an incident gust, the critical leading-edge suction parameter (LESP) is
perturbed, which in turn dynamically changes the flux of the vorticity from the leading edge. The results are used to
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train the algorithm to estimate the LESP and angle-of-attack histories from the surface pressure. Two different
approaches are used. In the first, which is a purely machine-learning strategy, a combination of convolutional and
recurrent neural networks that accept surface pressure measurements as input is used. The overall architecture is
shown to achieve an accurate estimation of the LESP and angle of attack. In the second approach, machine learning
is integrated with a dynamical systems framework to learn a dynamical model for the angle of attack and the LESP. It
is shown that this machine-learned system identification approach achieves somewhat higher accuracy as compared
to the purely machine-learning approach with fewer parameters. In both approaches, it is shown that overfitting is
mitigated by injecting random noise into the input pressures.

Nomenclature u~ = discrete forcing vector in machine-learned system

A~ = discrete system updating matrix in machine-learned identification algorithm
system identification algorithm w = parameters of the neural network
a1 = bias vector of the first recurrent neural network x = state vector of the dynamical system in machine-
layer learned system identification algorithm
a2 = bias of the second recurrent neural network layer xt = initial condition of the state vector in machine-
c = chord length of the flat plate, m learned system identification algorithm
J = loss function associated with the algorithm’s yT = time series of the target values for neural network
prediction error prediction
K = dimensionless pitch rate of the flat plate; α = angle of attack, rad
Δα∕
2Δtp  α0 = angle of attack when starting the pitchup process,
N
μ; Σ2  = normal random variable with mean μ and standard rad
deviation Σ γ = bound vortex strength of the flat plate, m∕s
pt = surface pressure coefficient at time step t ΔCp = coefficient of pressure difference between
p~ t = historical surface pressure coefficients of steps upper and lower surfaces of the flat plate;
before t 2
p − p− ∕
ρU2 
p , p− = pressure on the upper and lower surfaces of the flat Δtp = duration of pitchup of flat plate, s
plate, Pa Δα = change of angle of attack in the pitchup process, rad
S = peak variation of σ c Θ = weights of the second recurrent neural network layer
T = gust characteristic time, s θ = transformed coordinate along the chord
t = time, s Π = weights of the first recurrent neural network layer
t0 = time at which the flat plate starts to pitch up, s ρ = fluid density, kg∕m3
t1 = center time of the variation of the critical leading- σ = leading-edge suction parameter
edge suction parameter, s σc = critical leading-edge suction parameter
U = velocity of the flat plate, m∕s ϕ = operation of long short-term memory cell at the
U
a; b = uniformly distributed random variable between a second recurrent neural network layer after
and b multiplying the input with the weights and adding
the bias
ψ = long short-term memory operation of first recurrent
neural network layer and the outputs of the second
Presented as Paper 2019-1148 at the AIAA SciTech 2019 Forum, San recurrent neural network layer from the previous
Diego, CA, 7–11 January 2019; received 1 April 2019; revision received 1 time step
July 2019; accepted for publication 12 August 2019; published online 5
September 2019. Copyright © 2019 by the American Institute of Aeronautics Superscripts
and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved. All requests for copying and
permission to reprint should be submitted to CCC at www.copyright.com; t = discrete time step in machine-learned system
employ the eISSN 1533-385X to initiate your request. See also AIAA Rights identification algorithm
and Permissions www.aiaa.org/randp. 0
= ordinary derivative
*Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; weihou@g.ucla.
edu.
†
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; darwindarak@
I. Introduction
gmail.com.
‡
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; jdeldre@ucla.
edu. Associate Fellow AIAA. I N THIS study, we investigate the potential to apply deep learning
to gust detection in unsteady aerodynamics. During the course of
5079
 5080 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE
an airborne vehicle’s flight, there can be different forms of
disturbances that affect the vehicle’s aerodynamics. Some of these
disturbances are directly attributable to a variety of environmental
inhomogeneities, called “gusts,” that are incident upon the vehicle.
But such direct disturbances inevitably give rise to disturbances in the
rigid-body motion of the vehicle. In a small, light flight vehicle, both
of these forms of disturbance may induce leading-edge stall in the
wings, necessitating some form of flow control to regulate the
vehicle’s flight. But, the effectiveness of such control depends
crucially on estimating the state of the flow from available sensors
such as inertial measurements and surface-mounted pressure sensors.
All aerodynamic disturbances leave traces in the surface pressure. To
what extent can these surface signatures be used to detect the
disturbances themselves and obtain information in the flowfield?
Deep learning has shown great potential in various fields, such as
image recognition [1] and natural language processing [2]. An
emerging interest in applying deep learning in traditional engineering
fields has manifested itself in attempts to integrate machine learning
with dynamical systems and fluid mechanics. There are several
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notable examples of these integrated studies. Lee et al. [3] used neural
network to reduce the drag in turbulent flow. Milano and
Koumoutsakos [4] used wall measurements to reconstruct the near-
wall flowfield in a turbulent channel flow. Brunton et al. [5] used a
data-driven method to identify the governing equations of dynamical
systems. Colvert et al. [6] used a neural network and local vorticity to
classify vortex wakes. Ling el al. [7] used deep learning algorithms to
improve a Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes turbulence model.
Tompson et al. [8] used a convolutional neural network to accelerate
the single time-step velocity update in an Euler solver. Otto and
Rowley [9] used a neural network to identify nonlinear dynamics
using a Koopman operator theory. Parish and Duraisamy [10] used
field inversion and machine learning to find closure for physical
models using a high-resolution simulation and experimental data.
Singh et al. [11] used machine learning to aid the prediction of flow
separation over airfoils. Wang et al. [12] used physics-informed
machine learning to reconstruct the Reynolds stress in turbulent flow.
Gautier et al. [13] used integrated machine learning to give closed-
loop control of flow separation. Many more examples were described
in the recent review by Brunton et al. [14]. However, there have been
few applications of advanced deep learning algorithms to the study of
unsteady aerodynamics.
Much of the challenge in applying machine learning to a given
problem lies in deciding what one seeks to learn from a given set of
input data. In the current context, we generally seek to learn
something about the transient disturbances to an airfoil from the time-
varying pressure distribution on the airfoil’s surface. Incident gusts
can take a wide variety of forms. However, ultimately, for flight
control purposes, we seek not the characteristics of the gust itself but
the response that it elicits in the aerodynamics of the airfoil. That
response can be observed in the wake, and often (for large-amplitude
gusts or for airfoils near stall) in the separation behavior near the
leading edge. Such responses have been demonstrated in several
recent experimental and computational studies (e.g., Refs. [15–18])
using various gust forcing modalities.
The overall airfoil response to a gust is attributable to vorticity
dynamics, to airfoil kinematics, and to their interactions. Although,
some of the vorticity may be the gust’s own because an airfoil at or
(t)
c
(t)
Fig. 1 Schematic of sensors (green circles) on a flat plate, shown here undergoing a representative transient change of angle of attack α
t with a
simultaneous time-varying critical LESP σ c
t. The inviscid vortex elements are depicted as blue (positive strength) and red (negative strength) circles,
with darker colors denoting stronger vortex elements.
near stall at the leading edge is a significant source of vorticity for
which the rate of release is disturbed by the gust’s incidence. This
influence is missing from linearized models of gust interactions, as
noted recently in Ref. [19]. In fact, in some cases, the effect of the gust
is primarily delivered through the disturbed flux of the leading-edge
vorticity and its subsequent interactions with the airfoil and with the
vorticity released at the trailing edge [20]. Thus, we seek in this study
to learn the time-varying release of vorticity from the leading edge of
a flat plate from the measured surface pressures.
Ramesh et al. [21] showed, from high-fidelity simulations, that the
release of vorticity from the leading edge of an airfoil can be
attributed to a criterion placed on the “leading-edge suction
parameter” (a normalized value of the integrated surface pressure in
the immediate vicinity of the airfoil nose), which is abbreviated as
LESP. If the LESP is within some critical bounds, then no vorticity is
released from the leading edge. However, if the LESP exceeds the
bounds, then vorticity is released with the strength required to return
the LESP to the allowable range. This criterion is well suited for an
inviscid vortex model of the aerodynamics because it can be used in
lieu of the Kutta condition at the leading edge of a flat plate. Although
Ramesh et al. [21] proposed that the critical LESP is invariant (i.e.,
determined only by the airfoil geometry and Reynolds number),
recent work by Darakananda et al. [20,22] has shown that it may vary
in time. In particular, these latter studies found, by assimilating
surface pressures from high-fidelity simulations with an ensemble of
inviscid vortex models of a flat plate at a fixed angle of attack, that
their estimated value of the critical LESP varied in time when the flat
plate was subjected to transient gusts. More important, the vortex
models contained no explicit representation of the gust but
reproduced the flow response with high accuracy through the use of
the LESP criterion. Thus, in light of the observations made in the
previous paragraph, it is possible to represent the influence of a weak
gust in a mathematical model by varying the critical LESP in lieu of
explicitly introducing the gust.
In this work, we seek to estimate the value of the time-varying
LESP from surface pressure data. These pressure data are obtained
from an inviscid vortex model in which the critical LESP has been
directly specified to vary in time, as shown schematically in Fig. 1. In
other words, we ask the following basic question: Can we learn the
value of the LESP that has produced, through the aerodynamics, a
certain measured surface response? This question may appear
superficially simple to address because the LESP itself is due directly
to pressure and, in fact (as we will discuss later in the paper), is
proportional to the lowest Fourier mode on the plate surface.
However, it is important to remember that, in the high-amplitude
cases of interest in this work, the flow response (and the surface
pressure) is nonlinearly dependent on the disturbed critical LESP so
that the surface pressures along the airfoil chord are not trivially
related to the leading-edge suction. Indeed, because of this
nonlinearity, it is not clear a priori that a measured distribution of
surface pressure can be uniquely attributed to a single disturbance.
There is already some evidence that a unique relationship between
pressure and disturbance can be extracted. As mentioned previously,
Darakananda et al. [20,22] have already found, using an ensemble
Kalman filter, that the critical LESP can be estimated from the
measured surface pressures when the plate is at a stationary nominal
angle of attack. However, that study assimilated the data into an
 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE
ensemble of dynamical models for the flow. In other words, it used
the surface pressures to augment an underrepresented description of
the dynamics. The present study makes no use of such a dynamical
model for interpreting the surface pressure. Furthermore, it goes
further by investigating situations in which the plate is undergoing a
simultaneous pitchup maneuver. Thus, the measured surface
pressures contain a combination of effects from plate motion and
from the leading-edge disturbance. Such effects are expected to enter
the pressure nonlinearly. We investigate in this work whether the
LESP and the time-varying angle of attack (AOA) can be
independently parsed from the measurements.
In Sec. II, we present some sample surface pressures for various
disturbances and maneuvers, and we describe the general
characteristics of the inviscid vortex model used for data generation.
In Sec. III, we introduce the machine-learning algorithms used in this
work. The approach we take relies fundamentally on neural
networks. For example, the initial layers of the algorithm apply
convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are known for their
utility in image recognition [1], to detect features in the two-
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dimensional spatiotemporal surface pressure data. But, we also seek
to capture causal behaviors in the data; for this, we make use of
recurrent neural networks (RNNs): specifically in the form known as
long short-term memory (LSTM) [2]. From these ingredients, we
introduce the neural network structure designed for detecting the
LESP, and we describe the generation of training and testing data
from a variety of cases with leading-edge disturbances and pitchup
maneuvers. Subsequently, in Sec. IV, we present the estimation
results of our trained algorithm and compare different methods for
preventing overfitting. We also directly apply the algorithm with
some minor modification to the task of estimating the angle of attack
from the same surface pressure data. By comparing the internal
values associated with the inner structure of the algorithms, we
interpret how the neural network works. Finally, in Sec. V, we
propose another algorithm called machine-learning system
identification (MLSID), with fewer parameters to learn, that uses
a) Plate impulsively started without a gust; the plotted
range of DCp is (–6, 0)
c) Plate is pitching up without gusts; the plotted range is
(–15, 0)
Fig. 2 Spatiotemporal contour plots of pressure jump coefficient ΔCp for different disturbances.
5081
machine learning to identify (from surface pressures) an underlying
linear dynamical model for the desired quantities.
II. Problem Formulation
This study focuses on leading-edge disturbances and pitchup
maneuvers applied to a two-dimensional infinitely thin flat plate of
chord length c translating impulsively from rest at velocity U. The
leading-edge disturbances will be referred to throughout this paper as
gusts for brevity. However, it should be understood that the incident
gust itself is not explicitly introduced in the generation of data; rather,
the gust’s effect is introduced by disturbing the critical LESP, as
discussed in the Introduction (Sec. I). These different disturbances
leave different signatures on the surface pressure of the plate, as
shown with a few examples in Fig. 2. This figure depicts the
coefficient of pressure difference between the upper and lower
surfaces of the plate [ΔCp  2
p − p− ∕
ρU2 ] generated by the
inviscid vortex model described in the following. Such time-varying
data, sampled uniformly in time, constitute the input in our various
machine-learning strategies. The vertical axis of each plot represents
the chordwise distribution, with the leading edge at the top and the
trailing edge at the bottom. The horizontal axis depicts the time
history in convective time units of t  tU∕c. Dark (blue) colors
indicate more negative pressures.
The surface pressure data are generated with an inviscid vortex
blob method. This method, which is essentially the same as described
by Ramesh et al. [21], uses point vortex elements for which the Biot–
Savart interactions with each other are regularized through the use of
a modified velocity kernel for which the blob radius is set to 0.01c.
The method is applied to the flow about a translating flat plate
undergoing a simultaneous change in angle of attack. The Kutta
condition is applied at the trailing edge, whereas the LESP criterion is
used at the leading edge. With the trailing-edge Kutta condition, the
bound vortex sheet strength on the plate can be expanded in a
standard Fourier form, as in thin airfoil theory, as
b) Plate impulsively started and subjected to a gust;
the plotted range is (–6, 0)
d) Plate is pitching up and subjected to a gust; the plotted
range is (–15, 0)
 5082 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE


1  cos θ X ∞
γ
θ; t  2U A0
t  An
t sin
nθ
sin θ n1
where the coordinate along the plate is given by
c where θk  πk∕
n − 1 and n  128. The pressure points at the
x 
1 − cos θ
2 leading edge (k  0) and the trailing edge (k  n − 1) are excluded
with the leading edge at x  0 (θ  0) and the trailing edge at x  c
(θ  π). The LESP σ, which is a signed value defined by Ramesh
et al. [21] to be proportional to the strength of the leading-edge
suction, is equivalent in these circumstances to the leading coefficient
in the Fourier expansion:
σ
t  4A0
t
It should be noted that the definition of the LESP used in Eq. (3) is
four times that of the definition in the work of Ramesh et al. [21], and
it represents the coefficient of the 1∕ sin θ term in the expansion as
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θ → 0. The LESP criterion monitors the instantaneous value of this
parameter to check that it lies within the bounds
−σ c
t ≤ σ
t ≤ σ c
t
where σ c
t denotes the current value of the critical LESP. In all cases
considered in this work, σ > 0. If σ lies within these bounds, then no
vorticity is released from the leading edge. If, instead, it exceeds the
bounds, then a new vortex element is released near the edge to ensure
that the updated value of σ is set to σ c . In most cases, the result of this
criterion is that, once the vorticity starts to be shed from the edge, σ
tends to remain equal to σ c for long time intervals. The strength of the
new element is necessarily proportional to the amount by which the
critical value is exceeded. It is useful to note that a critical value equal
to zero would correspond to enforcing the Kutta condition at the
leading edge.
As discussed in the Introduction (Sec. I), we simulate gusts in this
work by varying the critical LESP. Specifically, we smoothly vary
this critical value from a baseline of 0.44, which corresponds to a
typical value found by Ramesh et al. [21] from offline calibration and
by Darakananda et al. [20] from data assimilation for undisturbed
flow past a flat plate at a moderate angle of attack. We generate a
smooth variation in the critical LESP in a compact time interval of
t ∈ t1 − 2T; t1  2T, which is symmetric about t1 , with a peak
denoted by S:
σ c
t  0.44  Sf

t − t1 ∕T
where the smooth distribution f
τ is inspired from the smooth ramp
function given by Eldredge et al. [23] and is defined as
 logcosh
3
τ1 cosh
3
τ−1∕cosh2
3τ
f
τ  2 logcosh
3 ; if τ ∈ −2; 2
0; otherwise
The value of three in the function is a parameter that defines the
smoothness of the change of the LESP and is sufficiently large that it
ensures that f is approximately equal to zero at the ends of the
interval, τ  −2, and τ  2.
We also prescribe a smooth change in the angle of attack of the
plate from α0 to α0  Δα over an interval of t ∈ t0 ; t0  Δtp  using
the same smooth ramp function as given by Eldredge et al. [23]:


K cosh
6
t − t0 
α
t  α0  log  KΔtp (7)
6 cosh
6
t − t0 − Δtp 
where K  Δα∕
2Δtp  is the dimensionless pitch rate, and the factor
of six is the smoothing parameter of the ramp.
The result of each use of the vortex blob model, with the critical
LESP and the angle of attack varied in these manners, is a
spatiotemporal distribution of surface pressure ΔCp on the plate, as
illustrated in the examples in Fig. 2. These surface pressures are
evaluated (“sensed”) at the Chebyshev nodes of the plate, which are
(1) expressed in chord coordinates as
c
xk 
1 − cos θk  for k  0; 1; 2; : : : ; n − 1 (8)
2
(2)
due to their infinite magnitude. Thus, a total of 126 pressure
measurements along the chord are taken. The output of the strategies
is the time-varying LESP and/or angle of attack that generated
such data.
Thus, each use of the vortex model with a choice of the gust and
maneuver parameters samples a relationship
(3) Y  F
σ c
t; α
t (9)
where Y ∈ RM×N denotes an M × N array of surface pressure data at
M pressure sensor locations sampled at N discrete times. The primary
objective of this work is to attempt to invert this relationship between
the gust and maneuver parameters and the surface pressure. However,
it should be noted the critical LESP, as an upper bound on the LESP, is
clearly unobservable in any data except when the LESP is actually at
(4) this bound; we can only seek to estimate the LESP itself. Thus, our
goal is to learn the following inverse relationships:
X g  Hg
Y; ξg ; X m  Hm
Y; ξm  (10)
where X g and Xm ∈ RN are, respectively, the LESP (with subscript g
for gust) and angle-of-attack (with subscript m for maneuver)
histories at the same discrete times as the pressure in Y; and ξg and ξm
are the sets of the parameters (e.g., weights and biases) that constitute
the relationships. For this task of approximating Hg and Hm , as well
as determining their respective parameter sets ξg and ξm , we will use
machine-learning methods discussed in the following sections.
III. Machine-Learning Methodology
As discussed previously, the pitchup maneuvers and gusts result in
disturbances in the surface pressure that vary both spatially and
temporally. According to Chen and Chen [24], a general neural
network can approximate nonlinear dynamical systems with certain
conditions posed on the activation functions. If we impose stronger
conditions, such as that the function we are approximating has certain
bounds on Fourier transforms, then by Barron [25], we can achieve an
(5) L2 norm of the error of the approximation that goes like 1∕n if the
artificial neural network has one layer of n sigmoidal nodes. These
results inspired us to use neural networks to identify the functional
relationship between the surface pressure difference and the time
histories of the LESP and angle of attack. This section describes the
(6) components of the machine-learning algorithm and the generation of
training data.
A. Convolutional Neural Network
A convolutional neural network is one of the most widely used
deep learning network structures: particularly in the field of image
recognition [1]. The core of a CNN layer is a linear filtering operation
that applies a common “tile” of weights (obtained by training) to each
contiguous block (or pixel patch) of the input data. The CNN can be
used to extract local features due to its translational invariance
property; it can also be interpreted sometimes as applying a discrete
version of a local differential operation, such as a gradient or
Laplacian. In contrast to a purely linear filter, the CNN also applies a
nonlinear activation function to each output pixel. Activation
functions can take different forms in machine learning, such as a
hyperbolic tangent (which saturates values outside of a certain range)
or a rectifying linear unit (RELU), which preserves only the positive
part of the input. The result of this set of operations, which is the
feature map, can be used as new inputs for the next neural
network layer.
 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE
xt xt
Input Gate it Output Gate ot
Cell
Input Value
xt jt ct
ft Forget Gate
xt
Fig. 3 LSTM schematic, adapted from Graves [29].
Usually, a pooling layer is connected to a CNN to select the most
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salient local feature among a set of adjacent pixels. In particular,
maximum pooling selects the maximum value from a small patch of
the feature map to pass to the next level. As the surface pressure plots
in Fig. 2 suggest, the signatures of the gusts and maneuvers may be
subtle and difficult to differentiate from each other. From Boureau
et al. [26], it is known that maximum pooling performs well in
classification problems with “sparse” features, which are features that
are subtle and challenging to activate. The pooling layer also has the
benefit of reducing the size of the data: for example, if maximum
pooling is applied to a 2 × 2 patch, then the size of the data is reduced
by a factor of four. In the case of our spatiotemporal data, we
generally apply maximum pooling only along the spatial dimension.
Overall, several CNN layers can be applied in succession to
approximate a function to high accuracy. The reader can refer to
Bishop [27] for a more detailed theoretical background on the CNN.
B. Recurrent Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory Cell
The recurrent neural network is prevalent in sequential series
modeling such as speech recognition. It is designed to recurrently
apply certain operations along a time series. The RNN can be
interpreted as a dynamical model for the data, supplying an updating
rule that is partly predesigned but also contains weights obtained
from training. Long short-term memory is one kind of RNN [2],
which was developed to avoid various problems in the basic RNN,
such as exploding and the vanishing gradient problem [28].
Each LSTM update step has a specific structure, as shown in Fig. 3
[29], for calculating the output value ht at a certain time level t from
the current input vector xt. It also makes use of various other
information, including some carried over from the previous time
level. This information, carried from one step to the next (the memory
in the network), is held in a cell state ct (also known as the hidden
state) that is passed to the output through an output gate ot . The cell
state depends in part on the current input vector after this vector is
combined in a weighted sum jt and then passes through an input gate
it . The dependence of this cell state on its previous value is metered
by a forgetting gate ft . Thus, the LSTM provides a mechanism for
preserving the effect of a past event, like an indicial response function
in a linear dynamical system, but goes further by also providing a
Table 1 Ranges of LESP disturbance and pitchup values used in
generating the training and testing data
Parameter Value
t1 U∕c 0.2; 1.4
4T 0; 1.8
S −0.44; 0.36 uniformly distributed random perturbation
∼U
0; 0.044
t0 U∕c 0.2; 1.4
K 0; 0.6
α0 0; π∕4
Δα π∕4; π∕2
5083
means of selectively forgetting some of this past information. All of
these gates are determined from weighted combinations of the input
vector and hidden state, with weights determined from training. The
LSTM also builds in nonlinearity by employing activation functions
for most of these operations. Readers can refer to Goodfellow et al.
[30] for more detailed information on the RNN.
ht
C. Training Data Generation
As we will describe in the next section, the machine-learning
algorithm is trained to approximate the mapping from the time series
of the surface pressure distribution along the plate to the
corresponding LESP history (or, alternatively, the angle-of-attack
history). We used the vortex blob method described previously to
generate 125,000 sets of training and testing data: datasets that are
complete with both their input (surface pressures) and their known
output (LESP or angle-of-attack history). Each dataset was generated
by designating the characteristics of the LESP disturbance (t1 , T, and
S) and the angle-of-attack variation (t0 , K, α0 , and Δα), and running
the vortex blob model for two convective time units with a time-step
size of ΔtU∕c  0.01. The ranges of the LESP disturbance and
pitchup parameters are described in Table 1. All the parameters are
chosen from five uniformly spaced values from the aforementioned
range, except for T, which is chosen from eight such values. Note that
a random value was added to the LESP disturbance amplitude in
order to ensure some randomness in the training data. The details of
the training process will be described in the next section.
As one can see from Table 1 and the explanation, the number of
values to choose for each parameter in their own range is not rich
enough to make accurate interpolations. Especially for the variance of
the LESP to represent gust, the peak of the LESP variation is evenly
spaced by 0.2, which is large as compared to the accuracy of the
prediction this algorithm is trying to achieve. Thus, the trained
algorithm must contain an approximation of the system dynamics
and does not simply provide an interpolation among the training
dataset.
IV. Estimation of LESP Disturbance and Pitchup
Maneuver
In this section, we describe a machine-learning strategy for
estimating the time histories of the LESP disturbance and the angle of
attack that produce a given surface pressure distribution. We will
focus the explanation on the algorithm for the LESP; the angle-of-
attack strategy is similar and will be described briefly later in this
section. The section concludes with a discussion of the historical
evolution of our machine-learning architecture.
A. Algorithm Description
Figure 4 depicts the overall neural network architecture we
designed for approximating Hg for estimating the discretely time-
varying LESP (Xg ∈ RN ) from the surface pressure data Y. These
data are input to the algorithm as a two-dimensional matrix of size
RM×N . The first dimension M, which we will refer to as the “width” of
the input data, corresponds to the discrete spatial locations at
Cheybshev nodes distributed between the leading and trailing edges;
here, M  126, which is equal to 128 nodes minus the two values at
the edges themselves. The other dimension N, which is the “height”
of the input data, corresponds to the number of discrete sample times
(with the sampling interval identical to the time-step size of the vortex
blob method that generated the data: ΔtU∕c  0.01). Because all
cases were run to two convective times, the height of the input data is
N  201. Because the eventual output of the network constitutes
scalar time-varying data, it has dimension R1×201 (or simply R201 ). In
fact, the height of the data never changes from layer to layer. The
machine-learning algorithm and optimization step are implemented
using TensorFlow [31].
The first layer of the network, involving noise injection, is used to
prevent overfitting and will be discussed in the following in the
context of training. The second layer, which is the data preprocessing
block, is designed to treat some spurious values in the input data.
 5084 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE
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Fig. 4 Computational graph of the machine-learning algorithm.
Because we generate these data using an inviscid vortex model, and
the interactions between the vortex elements and the plate in this
model are not regularized, then the elements that come very close to
the plate can exert unphysically large (negative) pressures. Although
the situation is rare, the resulting high-pressure data points can
disrupt the training of the neural network. However, simply
eliminating the invalid values can be detrimental to the algorithm
because it discards potentially valuable information. In this
algorithm, we use a CNN followed by a hyperbolic tangent function
to saturate the invalid pressure values, but we retain information
about the remaining (physically meaningful) pressures. The CNN
contains 16 separate filters, with each using a 5 × 5 tile of weights so
that the output of this layer is of size R16×126×201 . The first dimension
(16) constitutes the depth of the output volume of the layer.
The preprocessed data are then sent into the first of two core
blocks: a series of CNNs, each with a 5 × 5 tile of weights; and
maximum pooling layers with a spatial dimension of three. This
block’s purpose is to detect and amplify features in the pressure data
that can be used to discern phenomena and events in the fluid
dynamics. Each of the CNN layers contains a separate subfilter to
operate on each depth dimension of the input data. The outputs of
these subfilters are combined and then sent through some number of
other filters: the output of the first CNN, for example, is R8×126×201 .
Then, the maximum pooling reduces the width of the data by a factor
of three: for example, R8×42×201 . Eventually, the output of the CNN
block is of size R16×5×201 . The basic principle of this deep structure of
CNN filters is to identify as many local features as possible that might
inform the global behavior inherent in the final estimates of the
overall network.
The output of this CNN block, after the first two dimensions are
stacked into a vector with a length of 80, is delivered as input to the
next: an RNN block consisting of two LSTM layers. These layers
resemble a traditional fully connected neural network layer but with
the additional powerful ability of an LSTM RNN to selectively retain
and discard information. The first RNN layer outputs data of size
R128×201 , and the second RNN layer reduces the data to size R4×201 .
The output of this layer is used as input to four linear and nonlinear
functions, with each applied to the corresponding channel in the RNN
output. The purpose of these functions is to serve as a means of
providing rich content for reconstructing the output signal. The final
output of the algorithm Xg is obtained by linear combination of the
output of these functions, which is followed by a final tanh activation.
B. Training and Testing the Neural Network
A neural network is trained [that is, the network weights and
biases, such as ξg in the gust map in Eq. (10), are determined] by
minimizing a metric over the training dataset. This metric, called the
loss function, is constructed to measure the error between the network
estimate and the known output of the input data Y.
1. Training Details
As described earlier in the paper, a total of 125,000 sets of data was
generated for training. In addition, a batch of 6075 sets was generated
for testing the trained network by randomly varying the values
mentioned earlier in training data generation in Sec. III.
Network training relies on a technique called backpropagation to
estimate the gradient of the loss function with respect to the network
weights; this gradient is used to adjust the weights, with a step size
called the learning rate, within an overall optimization framework
that seeks to minimize the loss function. In our training, we used both
stochastic gradient descent [31] and the Adam optimizer [32].
Stochastic gradient descent subtracts the gradient of the loss function,
weighted by the step size, from the current value of the set of
parameters at each iteration. The Adam optimizer is a variation of the
stochastic gradient descent method, which has been shown to
outperform many other training algorithms. Because the
aforementioned algorithms only use the gradient and do not require
the Hessian matrix, these optimization methods are computationally
efficient. For each iteration, one method is selected based on the
output of the current iteration. In each iteration, the method used in
that iteration randomly selects, from the overall collection, a
minibatch of datasets to backpropagate over; we used 100 sets in each
minibatch.
Two loss functions were used in the training procedure. The first
was the L1 norm of the difference between the estimated and known
output vectors (of length 100N) over the entire minibatch. The
second was the mean-squared error (MSE) over the same minibatch.
Because the L1 norm is well known to be less sensitive to outliers (the
invalid cases), the training was started by minimizing the L1 norm for
the first set of iterations. Our experience has shown that this initial
training converges quickly. However, because the variation in the
LESP history is smooth, we expect the second moment of the error to
be low; so, after some number of iterations with the L1 norm, we
switched the training to minimizing the MSE. We also lowered the
 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE
learning rate from 10−3 to 10−4 during this switch, ensuring a
smoother adjustment of weights during this interval. It should be
noted that training required some degree of user supervision.
Testing of the network was carried out (simultaneously with the
training) with minibatches of 100 sets randomly selected from the
testing batch of 6075 as well; these were evaluated without
backpropagation and weight adjustment. Thus, the testing data were
kept anonymous to the training data in order to independently
evaluate the network’s accuracy. The L1 norm over each testing
minibatch was used as the metric to assess the error of the network.
2. Overfitting
Overfitting is a well-known phenomenon in the training of neural
networks in contexts where the number of neural network parameters
ξg is large as compared with the number of data points in the training
data. This phenomenon is similar to the familiar situation of fitting a
large-degree polynomial through a small number of data points: the
curve can easily be constructed to pass exactly through the data, but it
relies too much on the exact values of these points so that new data
Downloaded by Indian Institute of Science on December 8, 2023 | http://arc.aiaa.org | DOI: 10.2514/1.J058486
points are not accurately estimated. In a deep neural network, the
training can fit any set of data as long as the loss function achieves a
small value, but it does not necessarily lead to a good estimation for
other input data. This can be observed in Fig. 5a (no overfitting
prevention strategy), in which the testing metric converges to a
significantly larger value (0.015) than achieved during training
(0.01). Even if we continue the training to an even lower value of the
loss function, the testing metric remains stuck at 0.015. Thus,
overfitting severely limits the accuracy of the algorithm.
We considered two types of strategies to avoid overfitting in this
work. Dropout is a technique used widely in the training of neural
networks in which some values of the output of a certain layer of the
network are randomly set to zero or kept according to some “keep”
probability [33]. Using dropout, with a keep probability of 0.5, the
resulting testing metric value converges to 0.009, as shown in Fig. 5b.
However, this testing required the dropout to remain in effect even in
testing: if the keep probability was increased to one (i.e., all data were
a)
c)
Fig. 5 Comparison of the error metrics over 20,000 iterations of training (in orange) and testing (in blue) for three different strategies for preventing
overfitting.
5085
kept), then the testing metric increased to 0.014. Thus, for high
accuracy, we still must discard values even during the actual
estimation applications. So, in spite of the low metric value, the
dropout algorithm discards a significant amount of information,
thereby sacrificing the interpretability of the algorithm and limiting
the potential for further development and application.
We also explored another approach to avoid overfitting. In the
training, we multiplied each entry in the input data by a random
number chosen from a Gaussian distribution. In other words, if we
denote the original input pressure matrix by P, we generate a matrix N
where N ij ∼ N
μ  1; σ 2  0.052  for all i and j, and then we use
the elementwise product P~  P ∘ N as input in the next layer (the
data preprocessing step in Fig. 4). This multiplicative Gaussian noise
is inspired somewhat by the work of Li and Liu [34], who introduced
adaptive multiplicative Gaussian noise to avoid overfitting. However,
in that case, the adaptive noise was applied to the output of each layer,
whereas we apply the noise directly to the input. Using this approach
during training, we found that the resulting testing metric converges
to 0.0077 after the training metric (based on the L1 norm) was
reduced to 0.004, as shown in Fig. 5c (multiplicative Gaussian noise).
Because the testing metric reached this value after around 16,000
iterations, we deemed that this was a sufficient number of iterations
for training. More important, we did not need to introduce the
multiplicative noise in the estimation applications after training to
achieve low error.
One might be tempted to increase the noise variance to ensure an
even more robust training procedure. However, there is a limit on the
effectiveness of the procedure. In the present case, we found that the
neural network can achieve the same value of the training loss
function even if the standard deviation of the multiplicative noise is
set to 0.4, but the subsequent performance of the network on testing
data is severely inaccurate. In other words, if the noise in the input
pressure data is large, the function approximated by the neural
network no longer provides the relationship between the pressure
distribution and the LESP but, rather, some other function that is
almost irrelevant to the desired one. In such circumstances, the
performance of the network applied to the testing dataset is poor.
b)
 5086 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE

In conclusion, by comparing the results of the neural network
trained with dropout and with moderate multiplicative Gaussian
noise, the latter performs better on the testing dataset. We thus used
multiplicative Gaussian noise in the network training process.
C. Results and Discussion
As described previously and shown in Fig. 5c, the value of the L1
norm of the testing dataset is 0.0077. There are a few cases in which
the estimation can greatly deviate from the desired value. However,
most cases in the testing data show very good agreement with the true
LESP. The cumulative distribution of the loss function of the testing is
shown in Fig. 6a. Most of the testing cases have an error of less than
0.01, and almost all the cases have an error of less than 0.02. In
Figs. 6b–6e, we show an example of estimation in which the L1 norm
of the error is close to that of the average across the testing dataset.
The estimated LESP agrees well with the actual LESP (and with the
critical LESP because the LESP is at its upper bound for all of the
simulation). However, because the LESP and its critical value are
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assessment, the angle-of-attack history is assumed known.) The
comparison of Figs. 6c and 6d shows similar vorticity distributions in
the flowfield for the actual and the estimated cases. Figure 6e shows
that the strengths of the vortex elements released into the fluid at the
leading edge agree very well, and Fig. 6f shows that the total
circulation of the leading-edge vortex is estimated very accurately by
the vortex blob model using the estimated LESP history.
It is interesting to look deeper into the structure of the network, and
particularly into that of the second RNN layer. Figure 7 depicts the
gates and output values of one case. Each color represents a unit of the
RNN that corresponds to one function after the second RNN: blue for
the identity function, orange for the square function, green for
sigmoid, and red for the exponential function; the dotted line is the
scaled value of the LESP, which is included for reference. First, the
input value of the LSTM cell corresponding to the exponential
function converges to zero quickly, as shown in Fig. 7a. However, the
same RNN unit has a large variation in the hidden state (Fig. 7c),
especially during the time interval when the LESP is changing. This
variation propagates to the output gate where the value of the RNN

only surrogates for the desired results (for example, an estimation of
the leading-edge vortices generated during an agile flight maneuver
subjected to a gust), it is important to compare the flows generated by
the actual history of the LESP with the LESP history estimated by the
network when they are both used in a vortex blob model. (For this
unit for the exponential function is still significant (Fig. 7b). In
addition, the forgetting gate of the same RNN unit converges to zero
after the gust (Fig. 7d). However, as with many deep learning
architectures, it is difficult to extract intuition from these internal
values.

a) b)

c) d)

e) f)
Fig. 6 Representations of a) cumulative distribution of L1 norm of loss in testing data; b) one case of estimate with an L1 norm of 0.0072 (green line is
critical LESP, orange line is LESP, and blue line is estimated LESP); c) actual distribution of vortex elements at tU∕c  2 in testing case shown in Fig. 6b,
where color indicates the sign (blue for positive, red for negative) and magnitude (darker is stronger) of the element strength; d) distribution of vortex
elements at tU∕c  2 obtained by using estimated LESP history; e) comparison of strengths of each new vortex blob introduced at the leading edge (orange
line is actual strength, blue line is strength obtained by using estimated LESP history); and f) overall circulation in leading-edge vortex (orange line is actual
circulation, blue line is circulation obtained by using estimated LESP history).
 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE
a) Input values of second RNN layer (notice the RNN unit
corresponding to the exponential function becomes almost
zero shortly after start)
Downloaded by Indian Institute of Science on December 8, 2023 | http://arc.aiaa.org | DOI: 10.2514/1.J058486
c) Hidden state of second RNN layer (LSTM cells for
exponential function and identity function have greatest
change, thus retaining most information throughout)
Fig. 7 Gates and value history of one specific test case of estimation of LESP history.
D. Estimation of Angle of Attack
We apply the same neural network structure to the task of
recovering the angle of attack from the surface pressure data, but with
two minor changes. We reduce the number of units in the first RNN
later to 32 from 128 in order to save computation time. Also, we
change the activation function used in the final output from
hyperbolic tangent to a smooth rectifier (RELU) in recognition of the
fact that the angle of attack is constrained to vary in a positive range
0; π∕2. After going through the same training and validation
process, we obtain that the error for angle-of-attack estimation is
0.015, as shown in Fig. 8a. Considering the larger magnitude of angle
of attack as compared with the LESP, we conclude that the trained
algorithm for angle-of-attack estimation is as accurate as the neural
network for LESP estimation.
E. Evolution of Machine-Learning Structure
As is evident in Fig. 4, the structure of the machine-learning
algorithm we used in this work is complex. We arrived at this
structure via an evolution through a series of earlier architectures that
addressed simpler versions of the problems described in this paper.
For brevity, the quantitative results of these earlier efforts are not
reported here, but we provide some comments here on the
progression. In our earliest work, we focused on the prediction of
discontinuous changes of LESP at a constant angle of attack. For this
task, we found success by connecting a CNN to an RNN layer. Then,
in later work, when we allowed the angle of attack to increase
smoothly, as in this paper, we were able to predict a discontinuous
change of the LESP with multiple layers of CNN, but fewer than in
the architecture shown in Fig. 4. However, as the work of
Darakananda et al. [20] showed, a typical gust does not trigger a
discontinuous jump in LESP but, rather, a smooth variation. Thus,
our work in this paper has focused only on smooth simultaneous
changes in both the angle of attack and LESP. The depth and
complexity of the network shown in Fig. 4 were found to be sufficient
to disambiguate these smooth variations in the surface pressure data.
We have not attempted to show that this structure is necessary or
optimal, however; and it is likely that there are other choices for the
number of layers that would lead to similar performance.
5087
b) Output values of second RNN layer. LSTM cell for ex-
ponential function, identity function, and sigmoid function
have the most fluctuation of values
d) Forgetting gate of second RNN layer (RNN unit corresponds
to exponential function converging to zero after gust)
It is reasonable to wonder whether similar performance could be
achieved with just an RNN/LSTM receiving input directly from the
surface pressure sensors. However, the CNN layers serve two
important purposes. First, they reduce the dimension of input to the
RNN structure. This operation significantly reduces the number of
parameters needed for the neural network because the first RNN layer
is the layer with the most parameters. Furthermore, the CNN serves to
extract local features in a manner that cannot be achieved by the RNN
with lower dimension. The CNN thus provides a means for reducing
the number of parameters but also ensuring sufficient network depth
so that the universal approximation property of the multilayer
perceptron can be exploited.
One distinctive feature of the aforementioned neural network
structure is that it involves a small library of nonlinear functions
(some of which can be unbounded) instead of the typical sigmoidal
functions used in fully connected neural networks. The use of this
library allows the network to introduce a mix of different types of
signal amplification into the neural network. We observed a
significant drop in performance if, instead, we used a fully connected
layer with sigmoidal activation functions. Our results from the testing
set (an example of which is shown in Fig. 7b) indicate that the
exponential and identity functions have similar, as well as the most,
significant contributions among all the functions; although, this
balance of contributions clearly would depend on the nature of the
signal we seek to approximate.
V. Machine-Learned System Identification Method
In the last section, we developed a network architecture that
learned the functional relationship between surface pressures and the
LESP and the angle-of-attack histories. In this section, we propose a
different method in which we instead attempt to learn a dynamical
model that describes this relationship. The advantage of this approach
is that the resulting dynamical model is more readily analyzable with
standard tools as compared with an obscure deep neural network. We
describe this framework as machine-learned system identification.
Previous researchers have also proposed combinations of machine
learning and dynamical systems approaches. For example, the cluster
reduced-order modeling framework by Kaiser et al. [35] was
 5088 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE

a)
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b) c)
Fig. 8 Representations of a) error metrics during training of network for estimation of angle of attack [the training error (orange) converges to 0.01,
whereas the testing error (blue) converges to 0.015]; b) cumulative distribution of the L1 norm of loss in testing data; and c) one case of angle-of-attack
estimation with L1 norm of loss equal to 0.01430411, which is slightly lower than average loss but slightly higher than median loss (0.0143). The orange
curve is the actual angle of attack, whereas the blue line is the estimated value.

proposed to identify physical systems using machine-learning
models. The main difference is that the method proposed by Kaiser
et al. [35] assumes a Markov process in the transition of the dynamics,
whereas MLSID does not make this assumption.
To formulate MLSID, we assume that the desired quantity can be
described by a linear system of first-order differential equations with
forcing:
x_  A
p; px
~  u
p; p;
~ x
0  x0 (11)
The first entry of the state vector, x ∈ Rn , is the desired quantity;
the other n − 1 entries of x represent internal states. The matrix A and
the forcing u both depend on the current vector of surface pressure
coefficients p as well as historical values of these pressures, denoted
~ The vector x0 is the initial condition. We write this in time-
by p.
discrete form as
~ t ; p~ t xt−1  u
p
xt  A
p ~ t ; p~ t ; x0  x0 (12)
where xt denotes the current value of the state vector at time step t, pt
is the current pressure coefficient distribution on the surface of the
plate, and p~ t is some state variable vector dependent on the pressure
history and evolves with time. In fact, this latter vector comprises the
cell state (the memory) of an LSTM RNN cell, which is delivered as
input to the cell (via the forgetting gate) in the next time step. The
objective of the machine learning is to learn the time-varying
elements of the matrix A~ and forcing vector u.~ Because A~ ∈ Mn×n
R
and u~ ∈ Rn , the total number of outputs in each time step is n2  n.
As the schematic in Fig. 9 shows, we simulate the temporal evolution
of those values as a RNN with n2  n units. In fact, this RNN block
consists of two LSTM RNNs: the first to accept the output of a set of
three CNN layers used for preprocessing the pressure data, and the
second to populate the values of the matrix A~ and vector u. ~ The
rationale is that the first RNN layer evolves the output of the CNN
layers to another spatiotemporal map such that the evolution features
both long-term and short-term time dependency (a characteristic of
LSTM). Thus, the output is termed “generated pressure.” The second
RNN layer subsequently converts the generated pressure to the
elements in the updating matrices and the forcing vector. In addition
to the dynamical system updating matrices and forcing vectors, we
use a fully connected network to generate the initial condition x0 from
the pressure information of the first few time steps. These parameter
histories are then sent to the dynamical system block, where the state
vector is propagated by its update equation. During training and

Fig. 9 Machine-learned system identification structure to develop a dynamical system to estimate LESP and angle of attack (FCNN, fully connected
neural network).
 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE 5089

testing, the history of the propagated state vector is compiled and the the similar ranges, as shown in the comparison of Figs. 8b and 10b.
estimated value in this state vector is compared with the actual value The learning of initial conditions also contributed to the smoothness of
of that desired quantity, via the loss function. the estimation at the start, giving a better performance overall.

A. Estimation of Angle of Attack B. Estimation of LESP

We let n  4 (i.e., simulate a dynamical system with state vector of
dimension four) to train an MLSID neural network to detect the angle
of attack. For the initial condition, in order to reduce the number of
parameters, we use pressure information from the first two time steps
as input with a one-layer fully connected neural network and
hyperbolic tangent activation function (no hidden layer) to learn the
initial condition of the first two states; and the initial condition of the
remaining two states are set to zero. Because the diversity of the initial
conditions in the training data is low, this latter approach avoids the
overfitting that would arise with the addition of two more values to
learn. Although the number of parameters is small as compared to the
size of the training data, overfitting problems still emerged during the
training of the MLSID network, requiring the use of techniques to
Downloaded by Indian Institute of Science on December 8, 2023 | http://arc.aiaa.org | DOI: 10.2514/1.J058486
Increasing the number of hidden units of the RNN to 64 and the
number of internal states of the simulated dynamical system to six,
the same MLSID framework can be used to estimate the LESP. To
learn the initial condition of all states as well as the internal states of
the LSTM RNN layers, we used the values of the 32 pressure sensors
closest to the leading edge from their first five time samples as input to
a two-layer fully connected neural network, followed by a single
hidden layer with a hyperbolic tangent activation function. However,
the overfitting problem is even more severe than the purely machine-
learning algorithm, despite the small number of parameters. Thus, in
addition to the Gaussian noise injection layer used in the AOA
estimation case, a layer of “truncated” Gaussian noise injection was
inserted between the third CNN layer and the generated pressure
RNN layer. The rationale for drawing noise from a truncated

mitigate such problems. Indeed, even with such techniques, one can
still observe the difference between training and testing errors, Gaussian distribution (a distribution in which values are limited to a
showing the presence of overfitting. finite range about the mean) is the unboundedness of the
The training proceeds similarly to the previous section. As shown in backpropagation procedure in the RNN. This unboundedness is
Fig. 10a, the metric value for both the training and testing datasets described in the following.
decreases throughout the training but becomes flat after approximately We can formulate the dynamical system as
15,000 training iterations. It can be observed that the variation of the
metric value is relatively stronger and less stationary as compared to xt  A~t xt−1  u~ t (13)
the algorithm with only a neural network (shown in Fig. 8a). This
behavior is expected because the present method involves the
propagation through matrix multiplication, which is an operation that yt  cT xt (14)
is not bounded by activation functions, thus adding complexity and
instability to the training. Nevertheless, the algorithm achieves a better
accuracy than the purely machine-learning strategy, and with far fewer
parameters. The error distributions on the testing dataset are limited in c  1; 0; 0; 0; 0; 0T (15)

a)

b) c)
Fig. 10 Representations of a) metric evolution during training for angle-of-attack estimation using MLSID [the training error (orange) converges to
0.003, whereas the testing error (blue) converges to 0.0105]; b) cumulative distribution of the loss L1 norm of testing data for angle-of-attack estimation
using MLSID; and c) one case of angle-of-attack estimation of MLSID algorithm with L1 norm of loss equal to 0.01165, which is slightly higher than
average loss but around the same as median loss (0.01165). The orange curve is the actual angle of attack, whereas the blue line is the estimated value.
 5090 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE

where y is the desired output (LESP), and x is the state vector. The L1 where ϕ is the part of the operation of the LSTM cell at the second
loss of the expression is RNN layer after multiplying the input with the weights and adding the
bias, and ψ is the combination of the similar part of the LSTM
J
w  ky − yT k1 (16) operation as ϕ concatenated with the output values from the previous
time step of the second RNN layer; the stricture may seem
where y is the time series of the estimated value, yT is the time series cumbersome, but this type of formulation helps simplify the RNN
of the actual target value, and w is the set of parameters to be found structure in the formulation given in Eq. (20) and the analysis
during training to minimize J. For a parameter wi in the set, afterward. In addition, Π and Θ are the weights of the first and the
second RNN layers, respectively; a1 and a2 are the biases of the first
∂J X ∂yt and second RNN layers, respectively; and zt is the combined input
 sgn
yt − ytT  (17) for the RNN block at that time step (a combination of the output from
∂wi t
∂wi
the preceding CNN block and data from the previous time step).
It is important to note that, because we are only focused on a single
X ∂xt
 sgn
yt − ytT cT (18) entry in A~ t , the activation function ϕ and its argument are only scalar
t
∂wi valued in this discussion. However, the output of the first RNN layer
(via activation function ψ, which acts elementwise upon this output)
X   is vector valued, and so Θ is a correspondingly long vector of weights.
∂xt−1 ∂u~ t ∂A~t t−1
 sgn
yt − ytT cT A~ t   x (19) In contrast, Π is a matrix of weights, reconciling the length of the
∂wi ∂wi ∂wi
t input vector zt with that of the output of the first RNN layer. Biases a1
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and a2 are vector and scalar valued, respectively.

Now, for the last term in Eq. (19), the partial derivative for updating Let us then consider the gradient of A~tij with respect to one weight
matrix A~ with respect to the parameters in the RNN block is Πkl in this matrix, which is a typical entry in the ∂A~t ∕∂w tensor in the
unbounded if the second Gaussian noise layer attached to the end of backpropagation process:
the CNN block is allowed to apply unbounded noise to the input of One can write out the derivative as
the RNN. The derivation is shown in the following:
Because the updating rule of the RNN for some time step t uses the
output of the previous time step t − 1 to calculate the hidden states ∂A~tij

∇ϕΘψ
Πzt  a1   a2 Θψ ;k
Πzt  a1 ztl
and output for that time step, we treat those outputs and hidden states ∂Πkl
similarly to the actual input from the preceding CNN block. In this ∂zt
way, we can write that the one entry (i; j) of updating matrix A~ t at that 
∇ϕΘψ
Πzt  a1   a2 ΘJψ
Πzt  a1 Π
∂Πkl
time step is
X ∂At−1
nm
 (21)
A~tij  ϕΘψ
Πzt  a1   a2  (20) n;m
∂Π kl

a)

b) c)
Fig. 11 Representations of a) metric evolution during training for LESP estimation using MLSID [the training error (orange) converges to 0.005,
whereas the testing error (blue) converges to 0.0052]; b) cumulative distribution of the loss L1 norm of testing data for angle-of-attack estimation using
MLSID; and c) one case of LESP estimation of MLSID algorithm with L1 norm of loss equal to 0.003740, which is lower than average loss but slightly
higher than median loss (0.003734). The green line is the critical LESP, the orange line is the LESP, and the blue line is the estimated LESP.
 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE 5091

Table 2 Test results of presented algorithms with high pitch rate (0.6–0.8)
Quantity to detect Mean metric Median metric
Purely machine-learning algorithm LESP 0.020 0.017
AOA 0.083 0.070
MLSID LESP 0.022 0.022
AOA 0.084 0.067

Here, the prime
n;k denotes partial differentiation of its nth output
with respect to its kth parameter; in particular, ψ ;n represents the
partial derivative of the output value of the LSTM operation ψ with
respect to the function’s nth argument, and Jψ denotes the Jacobian
matrix of the operation ψ. No summation is implied by the repeated
indices.
The key revelation of Eq. (21) is that this gradient is proportional to
entries in the combined input vector zt. Part of this input to the first
RNN layer comes from the output of the CNN block, which is passed
through the Gaussian noise layer. If the noise introduced into zt is not
Downloaded by Indian Institute of Science on December 8, 2023 | http://arc.aiaa.org | DOI: 10.2514/1.J058486
full spectrum of the Gaussian random variable without truncation.
The second Gaussian layer is entirely within the network itself, with
the sole purpose to prevent overfitting. Thus, the necessary
modification (truncation) should be applied to minimize its effect in
disrupting the training.
With the noise injections and about 30,000 iterations of training, a
more accurate (shown in comparison of Figs. 5c and 11a) and more
stable (shown in comparison of Figs. 6a and 11b) estimation of the
LESP can be achieved using the MLSID algorithm with much fewer
parameters as compared to the algorithm with only neural network

bounded, the input vector will not be bounded, nor will the gradient
itself. One should also notice that the similar unbounded terms might
appear in the last term of Eq. (21) that, in its explicit form, will have
similar formulations as Eq. (21) for each of the summands. Those
summands will be unbounded, and so will the summation itself.
Thus, during training, the parameters in the first RNN layer might
incur unreasonably large changes, and these changes will propagate
to other parameters via the network’s coupling, generating an
instability. This instability can be prevented by truncating the noise
applied before the first RNN layer.
One might argue that the multiplicative Gaussian noise applied to
the input to the first CNN layer should also be truncated in similar
fashion. However, it should be noted that the design of the first CNN
layer for both MLSID and the purely neural network algorithm serves
to preprocess the data and to minimize the effect of the invalid
pressure points. The Gaussian noise injected here is not only a
regularization measure but also an imitation of the noise in actual
measurements. Thus, the first CNN layer should be exposed to the
structures.
VI. Limitations
The algorithms presented in this paper do have certain limitations.
Specifically, as is typical of neural networks, these algorithms are
generally only capable of interpolation within the range of data on
which they are trained. We illustrate this point in this section with
another set of testing data in which the dimensionless pitch rates of
the flat plate are randomly chosen from a higher range (between 0.6
and 0.8) than the range used for training, whereas all other variables
are within the same range of variables presented in Sec. III. A total of
4050 such sets of testing data are generated and then used to test the
four algorithms presented in this paper. The results are shown in
Table 2. From the results, one can observe that all algorithms’
performances degrade in this testing range; but, the angle-of-attack
detection algorithms are more susceptible to degradation in this
higher pitch rate range, whereas the LESP detection algorithms suffer

a) b)

c) d)
Fig. 12 Four different examples of tests with pitch rates (between 0.6 and 0.8) higher than used for training: a) LESP detection using purely machine-
learning algorithm. b) Angle-of-attack detection using purely machine-learning algorithm. c) LESP detection using MLSID. d) Angle-of-attack detection
using MLSID. For LESP predictions, the blue line is the prediction, the orange line is the true LESP, and the green line is the critical LESP. The red dash
line is the normalized angle-of-attack change (scaled to lie within the range of LESP). For angle-of-attack predictions, the orange line is the actual angle-of-
attack profile while the blue line is the prediction.
 5092 HOU, DARAKANANDA, AND ELDREDGE
a relatively smaller loss of accuracy. This is expected because the
pitch rate directly affects the surface pressures attributable to the
change of angle of attack, whereas the pressures associated with the
LESP change are only indirectly modified by the pitch rate.
Compared to the results from the previous sections, the error due to
this higher range of pitch rate becomes the main source of error in the
algorithms.
Representative examples of the algorithms’ behaviors for these
high pitch rate tests are depicted in four separate cases in Fig. 12.
Figure 12a shows the LESP detection using a purely machine-
learning algorithm. Figure 12b shows the angle-of-attack detection
using a purely machine-learning algorithm. Figure 12c shows the
LESP detection using MLSID. Figure 12d shows the angle-of-attack
detection using MLSID. For LESP predictions, the blue line is the
prediction, the orange line is the true LESP, and the green line is the
critical LESP. The red dashed line is the normalized angle-of-attack
change (scaled to lie within the range of the LESP). For angle-of-
attack predictions, the orange line is the actual angle-of-attack
profile, whereas the blue line is the prediction. From the LESP
Downloaded by Indian Institute of Science on December 8, 2023 | http://arc.aiaa.org | DOI: 10.2514/1.J058486
detection cases in Fig. 12, the most significant errors occur when the
LESP changes concurrently with the high-rate pitchup maneuver. In
those cases, the algorithm cannot entirely distinguish the effect of the
gust (the change in LESP) from that of the pitchup maneuver. For
angle-of-attack detection, the trends predicted by the algorithms are
similar to those of the actual pitchup maneuver, but the magnitudes
are generally underpredicted. Indeed, it is interesting to observe that
the predicted profiles resemble those associated with lower pitch
rates from the training set. Overall, the algorithms, although less
accurate than when applied to data in the training range, are less
erratic than one might expect in an extrapolative role.
VII. Conclusions
In this study, two different uses of a deep learning algorithm were
demonstrated in the context of unsteady aerodynamics. First, a purely
machine-learning algorithm was introduced to estimate the leading-
edge suction parameter (LESP) value. For this task, multiple
convolutional neural network layers and two recurrent neural
network layers were used to construct the neural network. By
introducing a novel form of multiplicative Gaussian noise, the
problem of overfitting in the training of the neural network was
alleviated. The results show that the trained neural network can
accurately recover the value of the LESP for an impulsively starting
and pitching up plate subjected to gusts. This neural network
structure was generalized to the task of detecting the angle of attack
with minor modification. This work suggests that deep learning can
be used to aid the simulation of flow under gusts in realistic cases. In
particular, machine learning was used to reveal a relationship
between the measured surface pressures and the leading-edge
disturbance and airfoil maneuver that led to these pressures.
Another framework was also designed, which is called machine-
learned system identification, in which a neural network was used to
identify the time-varying coefficients of a linear dynamical system
model for the angle of attack or LESP. After some care was taken in
mitigating the overfitting challenges, the machine-learning system
identification achieved higher accuracy with fewer parameters for the
estimation of both the angle of attack and LESP. It was also shown
that, when some of the parameters of the flight characteristics in the
testing dataset lie outside of the range used for training, the
performances of both approaches degrade significantly: although not
as catastrophically as one might expect for such an extrapolation.
There are several other open questions that ongoing work will seek
to address. The requirements of the spatial and temporal sampling of
the measured pressures have not yet been explored. It will be
interesting to see whether a sparser set of data can be used to achieve
similar accuracy. Also, in this work, the generated data have been
obtained from a low-order vortex model. It remains to be seen
whether it will also apply to a scenario in which the data are obtained
from a higher-fidelity source, such as direct numerical simulation, or
from experiments. Finally, it would be interesting to further analyze
the resulting function approximation generated by the machine-
learning architecture: for example, in the manner in which it maps
input clusters to output clusters, as described in the work of Kaiser
et al. [35].
Acknowledgment
Support by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research
(FA9550-14-1-0328 and FA9550-18-1-0440) is gratefully ac-
knowledged.
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