Experimental Study of the Performance of a Propeller with Trailing-Edge Serrations

Experimental studies were conducted at a hemi-anechoic chamber to investigate the effectiveness of trailing-edge (TE) serration designs for reducing aerodynamic noise of a propeller. The propeller noise was measured under different speeds in both the vertical and horizontal directions. The thrust force produced by the propeller was also measured at rotational speeds. The flaplet, concave and sawtooth shapes of serration were integrated on the TE of baseline propeller to obtain three different serrated propellers. The results show that the flaplet, concave and sawtooth propellers improve the thrust force more than 10% on the basis of baseline propeller. Three types of TE serration all managed to attenuate large amount of noise, while the sawtooth serrations are more effective than flaplet and concave serrations in a wider frequency range. Then, the serration distribution length (DL) of sawtooth propeller was trimmed to other three different values to obtain the 3/4-DL, 1/2-DL and 1/4-DL propellers. The 3/4-DL propeller exhibited best comprehensive performance, by an average of 2.7 and 3.0 dB noise reduction in tested two positions and simultaneously generated overall 6.7% higher thrust force than did the baseline propeller. The morphological and parametric effects of TE serration in current studies are more significant in a relative high Reynolds number (1.4 × 10⁶).