Experimental investigation of NACA-0012 airfoil instability noise with sawtooth trailing edges

This study presents an experimental study of the effect of sawtooth trailing-edge serrations on airfoil instability noise. The far-field noise measurements are obtained to investigate the noise radiation characteristics of a NACA-0012 airfoil operated at various angles of attack: 0°, 5°, and 10°, and covered Reynolds numbers of 2.87 × 105, 3.71 × 105, and 5 × 105. It is found that as the Reynolds number increases, the instability noise shifts from tonal to broadband, whereas as the angle of attack increases, it shifts from broadband to tonal. Furthermore, sawtooth trailing-edges are used to minimize instability tonal noise, leading to considerable self-noise reduction. Parametric studies of the serration amplitude 2 h and streamwise wavelength λ are performed to understand the effect of sawtooth trailing-edges on noise reduction. It is observed that the sound pressure reduction level is sensitive to both the amplitude and streamwise wavelength. Overall, the sawtooth trailing-edge with larger amplitude and smaller wavelength produce the greatest amount of noise reduction.

Experimental study of wavy trailing edge serrations on flat rotor blades

A detailed experimental study is conducted to observe the effect of various parameters like wavelength, depth of serrations, and pitch angle on serrated blades' acoustic emissions at low speeds up to 2000 rpm. Experiments are conducted on flat blade rotors with sinusoidal serrations on the trailing edge of blades with different amplitudes and wavelengths. A total of 7 blades with different serration configurations, including a base configuration, are studied, five of them have serrations throughout the span of the blade, and one configuration has serration of varying amplitude on the farther half of the blade. It is observed that some blade configurations have resulted in tonal noise reduction noise as much as 8dB, whereas some of the serration configurations reduce very little to none, there is no significant effect of T.E serrations on the broadband noise emitted by the rotor. Directivity of noise generated from the rotor, the effect of serrations on the directivity of the noise is studied.