Explainable AI in Rotorcraft Aerodynamics: Autonomous Discovery and Dynamic Tracking of Vortex Ring State Mechanisms via Vision Transformers

The Vortex Ring State (VRS) is a critical aerodynamic hazard for rotorcraft, characterized by highly unsteady fluid–structure interactions and severe low-frequency vibrations. While data-driven deep learning models have shown promise in aviation state monitoring, their inherent “black-box” nature fundamentally contradicts the stringent interpretability requirements of airworthiness certification. To address this, we propose an “AI for Science” paradigm, investigating whether advanced Vision Transformers (ViT) can autonomously discover underlying aerodynamic mechanisms without human physical priors. First, to ensure absolute data fidelity, flight test datasets of a coaxial unmanned aerial vehicle were rigorously labeled using cross-validation from high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations and wind tunnel tests. One-dimensional vibration signals were then transformed into two-dimensional Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) spectrograms. By employing Target-Layer Gradient Adaptation (Grad-CAM) techniques, we conducted a systematic comparison between traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (ResNet50) and ViT. The results demonstrate that while CNNs suffer from diffuse attention caused by high-frequency noise, the frozen-backbone ViT model achieves a physically interpretable accuracy of 93.24%, while autonomously locking its global attention onto a perfectly horizontal feature band centered at 41.7 Hz. Crucially, this autonomously discovered feature precisely aligns with the theoretically derived once-per-revolution (1P) fundamental frequency of the rotor’s flap-lag coupling response under VRS aerodynamic turbulence. This research provides direct visual evidence bridging black-box AI decisions with classical fluid mechanics, proposing a “Mechanism-Guided Verification” framework that offers a trustworthy pathway for the future certification of AI in safety-critical aerospace systems.