cs.LGAug 12, 2026

Exemplar-based objective classification of gust-induced loads across multiple flight conditions

Authors: Paolo OlivucciKowshik SrivatsanDavid E. Rival

Organizations: Institute of Fluid Mechanics, TU Braunschweig, Hermann-Blenk Str. 37, Braunschweig, 38108, Germany.

Abstract

Is it possible to find an objective classification criterion that organizes the complexity of gust-induced loads across many flight conditions? And one that remains as interpretable as a labelling based on coarse parameters, such as the flight attitude? Our approach encodes a large number of experimental observations through a machine-learned representation and applies a summarization procedure to select a minimal subset of highly significant exemplars. The exemplars provide a similarity-based objective classification criterion of all the observations, they can be more conveniently inspected by experts and can become subject of more refined experiments. We demonstrate the approach on a database of 3480 pressure-load measurements induced by random gusts on a flying-wing model across six flight attitudes. We find nine fundamental response types that recur across multiple attitudes; analysis of a type's transient response enables physical intuition into the underlying fluid mechanics.

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