Numerical study of trailing-edge noise reduction mechanism of wind turbine with a novel trailing-edge serration

Abstract

Abstract The serration assembly installed at the trailing-edge of wind turbines can reduce the turbulent boundary-layer trailing-edge noise. This work studies the aeroacoustic response and noise reduction capability of four different trailing-edge serrations, involving a novel Multi-Flapped-Serration with Iron-Shaped Edges (MFS-Iron) presented here. These four serrations are retrofitted to S809 and NACA643418 airfoils. The Large-eddy simulation (LES) method and Ffowcs Williams and Hawkings integration (FW-H) methods are respectively employed to predict the unsteady flow field and far-field noise based on optimized structured and unstructured hybrid grids. From the numerical simulation results, we explore the trailing-edge noise reduction mechanism. The results show that the proposed MFS-Iron can effectively realize noise reduction under appropriate design parameters and optimize the aerodynamic layout. When using the MFS-Iron serration, the cross-flow intensity between the serration gap is significantly reduced, and the original two groups of symmetrical horseshoe vortex are mixed into a single vortex, which has a positive impact on the suppression of high-frequency noise. By further studying the Lamb vector divergence vortex dynamics process near the surface of serrated trailing-edge, it is found that the Lamb vector divergence is directly related to the intensity of the noise source.