A ship's air wake is dynamically detected using an airborne inertial measurement unit and global positioning system attached to a fixed wing unmanned aerial system. The instrumented aircraft is used for validation of computational fluid dynamic simulations of naval ship air wakes. A simulation was completed using Gridtool, VGrid, and Kestral to validate the experimental data collection method. Forces from the experiment were collected and compared with that of a one-way coupled CFD simulation mimicking the physical experiment. Similar trends in forces that indicate detection of the ship air wake were observed in both experimental and simulation data.
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