Aerodynamic noise prediction for wind turbine airfoils using non-linear acoustics solvers

The aerodynamic noise of a conventional sharp trailing edge wind turbine airfoil and its flatback version has been predicted using a non-linear computational aeroacoustics method and a traditional Reynold averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) computational fluid dynamics method in this paper. The flow structure obtained from the two methods is observed and compared, indicating that the non-linear method can provide much more detailed turbulence informations than the traditional RANS method. Compared with the aeroacoustics experimental data, results from the non-linear method show good agreement for both airfoils, while the other method gives an obvious underestimate for the sharp trailing edge airfoil. Finally, different noise generation mechanisms of the two airfoils are analyzed and different simulation capabilities of the two methods are discussed.