High-Efficiency Data Fusion Aerodynamic Performance Modeling Method for High-Altitude Propellers

During the overall design phase of solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a large amount of high-fidelity (HF) propeller aerodynamic performance data is required to enhance design performance, but the acquisition cost is prohibitively expensive. To improve model accuracy and reduce modeling costs, this paper constructs a multi-fidelity aerodynamic data fusion model by associating data with different fidelity. This model utilizes a low-fidelity computational method to quickly determine the design space. The constrained Latin hypercube sampling based on the successive local enumeration (SLE-CLHS) method and the expected improvement (EI) criterion were adopted to achieve the efficient initialization and fastest convergence of the Co-Kriging surrogate model within the design space. This modeling framework was applied to acquire the aerodynamic performance of high-altitude propellers, and the model was evaluated using various performance indicators. The results demonstrate that the proposed model has excellent predictive performance. Specifically, when the surrogate model was constructed using 350 high-fidelity samples, there were improvements of 13.727%, 12.241%, and 5.484% for thrust, torque, and efficiency compared with the surrogate model constructed from low-fidelity samples.