FLOW-GLIDE: Global–Local Interleaved Dynamics Estimator for Flow Field Prediction

Accurate prediction of the flow field is crucial to evaluating the aerodynamic performance of an aircraft. While traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods solve the governing equations to capture both global flow structures and localized gradients, they are computationally intensive. Deep learning-based surrogate models offer a promising alternative, yet often struggle to simultaneously model long-range dependencies and near-wall flow gradients with sufficient fidelity. To address this challenge, this paper introduces the Message-passing And Global-attention block (MAG-BLOCK), a graph neural network module that combines local message passing with global self-attention mechanisms to jointly learn fine-scale features and large-scale flow patterns. Building on MAG-BLOCK, we propose FLOW-GLIDE, a cross-architecture deep learning framework that learns a mapping from initial conditions to steady-state flow fields in a latent space. Evaluated on the AirfRANS dataset, FLOW-GLIDE outperforms existing models on key performance metrics. Specifically, it reduces the error in the volumetric flow field by 62% and surface pressure prediction by 82% compared to the state-of-the-art.