Blog post | Paper | Colab notebook
In this project, I use Navier-Stokes to simulate a wind tunnel, place a rectangular occlusion in it, and use gradient descent to optimize its lift/drag ratio. This gives us a wing shape. I'm releasing this repo as a supplement to a series of blog posts I wrote about human flight.
To obtain the figure below: clone this repo, cd into it, and run python main.py
Note: the code and ideas in this repo build on this Autograd demo.
Biplane wing. When making the differentiable region wider (in hopes of a wider wing) the wing split into two wings, like a biplane.
Shattered wing. When adjusting the granularity of the simulation, we accidentally made the wing shatter into many little wings. Fun to look at, but probably not so fun to fly with.
Stubby wing. This sad little wing occurred after making the initial rectangle too impermeable. Not enough simulated air was making it past the boundary layer of the rectangle so we hit a bad local minima.
