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Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica ›› 2026, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (16): 132983.doi: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2025.32983

• Fluid Mechanics and Flight Mechanics • Previous Articles    

Airfoil icing and aerodynamic characteristics prediction based on multi-task learning

Huizhu XIN1,2, Chen LI3, Weimin SANG1,2(), Liang HOU1,2   

  1. 1.School of Aeronautics,Northwestern Polytechnical University,Xi’an 710072,China
    2.National Key Laboratory of Aircraft Configuration Design,Xi’an 710072,China
    3.Shanghai Satellite Engineering Research Institute,Shanghai 201109,China
  • Received:2025-10-28 Revised:2025-11-17 Accepted:2025-12-15 Online:2025-12-29 Published:2025-12-29
  • Contact: Weimin SANG E-mail:sangweimin@nwpu.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    Open Fund of Key Laboratory of Icing and Anti/De-icing(IADL20230302);National Natural Science Foundation of China(12572270);The “1-0” Major Engineering Science Problem Project of Northwestern Polytechnical University(G2024KY0613)

Abstract:

To address the problem of limited accuracy in single-task learning for airfoil icing prediction and the difficulty in simultane-ously obtaining icing morphology and aerodynamic characteristics, a multi-task learning based airfoil icing prediction framework called MTAF (Multi-Task Airfoil Former) is proposed. The framework employs an encoder-decoder architecture that extracts deep representations of airfoil geometry and flight conditions through a shared feature encoder, realizes feature fusion and task interaction via a task correlation module, and accomplishes icing prediction and aerodynamic coefficient prediction respectively through dedicated prediction heads. The performance of Transformer and ConvNeXt backbone net-works within this framework is comparatively studied. Based on training and testing with 625 NACA 2412 airfoil samples, results demonstrate that the Transformer architecture achieves pixel accuracy of 99.79% and coefficient of determination for 0.990 6 in icing prediction tasks, significantly outperforming 99.50% and 0.977 2 of ConvNeXt. For aerodynamic coefficient prediction, Transformer achieves coefficient of determination values of 0.975 4 for lift coefficient and 0.987 4 for drag coefficient, which are comparable to 0.973 3 and 0.990 1 of ConvNeXt, respectively, with each architecture showing distinct advantages. The MTAF framework maintains stable prediction performance across different icing types and various flight conditions, providing a high-precision prediction tool for airfoil icing engineering applications.

Key words: aircraft icing, image prediction, aerodynamic characteristics, Transformer, convolutional neural network

CLC Number: