Experimental Investigation of Airfoil Instability Tonal Noise Reduction Using Structured Porous Trailing Edges

Reducing the tonal noise from airfoil instabilities has attracted significant interest from the aeronautical community in the past few years. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of structured porous trailing edges on the tonal noise reduction performance of a symmetrical NACA 0012 airfoil. Detailed parametric testing was performed in an open-jet wind tunnel between the baseline solid trailing edge and seventeen structured porous trailing edges with different sub-millimeter-scale pores. The experimental results demonstrate that structured porous trailing edges can reduce the noticeable tonal noise of the symmetrical NACA 0012 airfoil. Moreover, the design parameters for the structured porous edges have slightly different impacts on the tonal noise reduction performance between a zero angle of attack (α = 0°) and a non-zero angle of attack (α = 10°): better airfoil tonal noise reduction is due to the porous parameters of small pore coverage, small-to-moderate chordwise spacing, and moderate spanwise spacing at α = 0°. On the other hand, the optimal combination of the structured porous edge at α = 10° is the configuration with larger pore coverage, smaller chordwise spacing, and spanwise spacing.