Journal of Bionic Engineering ›› 2022, Vol. 19 ›› Issue (5): 1405-1421.doi: 10.1007/s42235-022-00210-3
Utilization of Whale-inspired Leading-edge Tubercles for Airfoil Noise Reduction
Weijie Chen1, Liangji Zhang1, Liangfeng Wang2, Zuojun Wei3, Weiyang Qiao1
- 1 School of Power and Energy, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710129, China 2 China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center, High Speed Aerodynamic Institute, Mianyang 621000, China 3 Department of Mechanics and Aerospace Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China
Utilization of Whale-inspired Leading-edge Tubercles for Airfoil Noise Reduction
Weijie Chen1, Liangji Zhang1, Liangfeng Wang2, Zuojun Wei3, Weiyang Qiao1
- 1 School of Power and Energy, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710129, China 2 China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center, High Speed Aerodynamic Institute, Mianyang 621000, China 3 Department of Mechanics and Aerospace Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China
摘要： Numerical studies are conducted to explore the noise reduction effect of leading-edge tubercles inspired by humpback whale flippers. Large eddy simulations are performed to solve the flow field, while the acoustic analogy theory is used for noise prediction. In this paper, a baseline airfoil with a straight leading-edge and three bionic airfoils with tubercled leading-edges are simulated. The tubercles have sinusoidal profiles and the profiles are determined by the tubercle wavelength and amplitude. The tubercles used in this study have a fixed wavelength of 0.1c with three different amplitudes of 0.1c, 0.15c and 0.2c, where c is the mean chord of the airfoil. The freestream velocity is set to 40 m/s and the chord based Reynolds number is 400,000. The predicted flow field and acoustic field of the baseline airfoil are compared against the experiments and good agreements are found. A considerable noise reduction level is achieved by the leading-edge tubercles and the tubercle with larger amplitude can obtain better noise reduction. The underlying flow mechanisms responsible for the noise reduction are analyzed in detail.