CFD Correction of Open Tip Clearance Flow in a Compressor Cascade Using VAE Latent Space Adaptation

Xiang Zuo, Hefang Deng, Caiyan Chen, Honglin He, Mingmin Zhu +2

CFD predictions of open tip clearance flow in compressor cascades are subject to discrepancies relative to experiments, while experimental observations are sparse and high-resolution experimental ground truth is unavailable. This study proposes a non-intrusive correction method based on a variational autoencoder (VAE) and latent-space adaptation. A VAE is first trained using a dataset of 166 parametrically sampled CFD total pressure loss fields to learn a low-dimensional statistical representation of these fields. The VAE is then frozen, and a low-rank latent-space adapter is trained using only 12 paired CFD--experiment operating conditions. An observation operator maps the corrected high-resolution fields to the experimental observation space, allowing supervision to be applied only at the available measurement locations and within the measured pitchwise windows. In the current 12-fold cross-validation, the mean absolute error decreases from 0.1335 to 0.0473, the root mean square error from 0.1717 to 0.0621, and the relative $L_2$ error from 0.5108 to 0.1871. These results indicate that the method improves agreement between CFD predictions and sparse experimental observations of…