Information Transport and Observability in Compressible Aerodynamics

Abstract

Pressure measurements provide sparse but direct observations of compressible aerodynamic flows, yet how information about hidden aerodynamic parameters is transported through the flow and encoded in these observations remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate information transport and observability in compressible aerodynamics using a differentiable shock-capturing immersed-boundary solver. By propagating gradients through the full unsteady flow solution, an automatic-differentiation-based observability metric is introduced to quantify the sensitivity of sparse pressure measurements to unknown aerodynamic parameters and identify informative sensing locations for inverse learning. The results reveal that aerodynamic information is transported non-uniformly through the flow field, producing localized regions of high observability. Inverse-learning experiments further demonstrate that observability and learnability are related but distinct concepts: although highly observable probes generally facilitate accurate parameter recovery, the highest-observability probe is not consistently the most effective for parameter inference. Furthermore, both the flow regime and the airfoil geometry substantially influence the distribution of observability and the convergence behavior of inverse learning. These findings establish a quantitative framework for understanding how aerodynamic information is encoded in sparse measurements and demonstrate the potential of automatic differentiation for observability analysis, informative sensor selection, and aerodynamic inverse analysis.