Experimental Validation of the CFD-generated Airwake of an Aircraft Carrier with Simulated Atmospheric Turbulence

This paper describes an experimental study in which a 1:200 scale model of a twin island aircraft carrier was submerged in a water channel and Acoustic Doppler Velocimetry (ADV) was used to measure the unsteady flow over the deck. The study was conducted to provide experimental data to compare with Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations of the air flow over the full-scale, 280 m long, aircraft carrier for two different freestream turbulence conditions. The CFD was carried out using Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation (DDES) to generate 30 seconds of unsteady flow over the ship. The same CFD method was also applied to the small-scale experiment to provide further validation data. Comparisons are made between the experimental measurements and the CFD solutions for the two different turbulent inlet conditions. The results show good agreement between the computed ship airwakes of each inlet condition and the corresponding experimental measurements of the flow.