Heuristic Learning for Active Flow Control Using Coding Agents

Modeling and controlling fluids is critical across science and engineering. Effective flow control can increase lift, reduce drag, enhance mixing, and attenuate noise, potentially unlocking new technologies. Yet controlling fluids is hard: the dynamics are high-dimensional, nonlinear, and multiscale. While reinforcement learning (RL) has recently succeeded in robotics and protein folding through shared benchmarks, fluid dynamics has resisted such progress: each controller is typically tuned to a single geometry and operating point, making results hard to accumulate, transfer, and compare. We introduce HydroGym, a solver-independent RL platform for flow control, and show that standardized infrastructure unlocks transferable control intelligence across flow regimes. HydroGym provides 61+ validated environments spanning laminar to turbulent flows, with systematic Reynolds number progressions up to Re=400,000 and Mach number variations in 2D and 3D. It supports diverse backends, including finite-volume, spectral-element, finite-element, lattice-Boltzmann, and fully differentiable solvers for gradient-enhanced optimization. Across environments, RL agents consistently discover robust control principles, such as boundary-layer manipulation, acoustic-feedback disruption, and wake reorganization, yielding drag reductions exceeding 90% in canonical configurations. Critically, we demonstrate zero-shot transfer: agents trained only on a simplified channel flow achieve 38% friction-drag reduction on an unseen 3D wing section at chord Reynolds number Re=200,000 reducing exploration costs by four orders of magnitude versus direct on-wing optimization. This suggests RL agents uncover essential physics rather than configuration-specific patterns, pointing toward generalizable control. HydroGym offers extensible, scalable community infrastructure for fluid dynamics, machine learning, and control research.

Active flow control is a fundamental application in engineering. Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have made progress in this field. However, the classical online RL approaches require extensive real-time interactions with the high fidelity environment, while each sensor configuration change necessitates whole policy retraining. All these factors result in prohibitive computational costs for real-world applications. In this work, we propose a novel offline RL framework that addresses both challenges through data-driven policy extraction. We develop a sensor position-conditioned architecture that enables a single policy network to adapt seamlessly to multiple sensor arrangements. The position-conditioned approach incorporated spatial relationship modeling through Point Attention layers to ensure the generalizability to varying sensor placements. We demonstrate the framework on two representative problems, mitigating chaoticity in the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation and flow control over airfoils governed by the Navier-Stokes equation. The result demonstrates that the policy extraction from the dataset provides unprecedented flexibility for sensor placement optimization. This approach represents a significant step towards adaptive, intelligent flow control systems.

This study investigates active flow control (AFC) of a 30P30N high-lift wing at a Reynolds number Re$_c$ = 450,000 and angle of attack $α$ = 23$^\circ$ using wallresolved large-eddy simulations (LES). Two optimization strategies are explored: open-loop Bayesian optimization (BO) and closed-loop deep reinforcement learning (DRL), both targeting the mitigation of stall and the improvement of aerodynamic efficiency via synthetic jets on the slat, main, and flap elements. The uncontrolled configuration was validated against literature data, confirming the reliability of the LES setup. The BO framework successfully identified steady jet velocities that increased efficiency by +10.9% through a -9.7% drag reduction while maintaining lift. In contrast, the DRL agent, despite leveraging instantaneous flow information from distributed sensors, achieved only minor improvements in lift and drag, with negligible efficiency gain. Training analysis indicated that the penalty-dominated reward constrained exploration. These results highlight the need for carefully designed rewards and computational acceleration strategies in DRL-based flow control at high Reynolds numbers.