AeroGTO: An Efficient Graph-Transformer Operator for Learning Large-Scale Aerodynamics of 3D Vehicle Geometries

Obtaining high-precision aerodynamics in the automotive industry relies on large-scale simulations with computational fluid dynamics, which are generally time-consuming and computationally expensive. Recent advances in operator learning for partial differential equations offer promising improvements in terms of efficiency. However, capturing intricate physical correlations from extensive and varying geometries while balancing large-scale discretization and computational costs remains a significant challenge. To address these issues, we propose AeroGTO, an efficient graph-transformer operator designed specifically for learning large-scale aerodynamics in engineering applications. AeroGTO combines local feature extraction through message passing and global correlation capturing via projection-inspired attention, employing a frequency-enhanced graph neural network augmented with k-nearest neighbors to handle three-dimensional (3D) irregular geometries. Moreover, the transformer architecture adeptly manages multi-level dependencies with only linear complexity concerning the number of mesh points, enabling fast inference of the model. Given a car's 3D mesh, AeroGTO accurately predicts surface pressure and estimates drag. In comparisons with five advanced models, AeroGTO is extensively tested on two industry-standard benchmarks, Ahmed-Body and DrivAerNet, achieving a 7.36% improvement in surface pressure prediction and a 10.71% boost in drag coefficient estimation, with fewer FLOPs and only 1% of the parameters used by the prior leading method.