Mach Number Prediction for 0.6 m and 2.4 m Continuous Transonic Wind Tunnels

Abstract

With the development of the design technology, more and more advanced and diverse wind tunnels have been constructed to match complex requirements. However, it is hard to design a precise physical model of a wind tunnel that can be controlled. In addition, if a new wind tunnel is designed, the experimental data may be insufficient to build a controlling model. This article reports research on the following two models: (1) for a 0.6 m continuous transonic wind tunnel supported by a large amount of historical data, the false nearest neighbor (FNN) algorithm was adopted to calculate the order of the input variables, and the nonlinear auto-regressive model with the exogenous inputs–backpropagation network (NARX-BP) was proposed to build its Mach number prediction model; (2) for a new 2.4 m continuous transonic wind tunnel with only a small amount of experimental data, the method of model migration, the input and output slope/bias correction–particle swarm optimization (IOSBC-PSO) algorithm, was developed to convert the old model of the 0.6 m wind tunnel into the new model of the 2.4 m wind tunnel, so that the new Mach number prediction could be conducted. Through simulation experiments, it was found that by introducing the NARX-BP algorithm to build the Mach number prediction model, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the model decreased by 44.93–77.90%, and the maximum deviation (MD) decreased by 64.05–85.32% compared to the BP model. The performance of the IOSBC-PSO migration model was also better than that of the non-migration model, as evidenced by the 82.06% decrease of the RMSE value and the 78.25% decrease of the MD value. The experiments showed the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.