The subject area of study focuses on the noise reduction of wind turbine blade noise emission. Due to government limits on noise pollution, wind turbines have to run on a lower power yield in order to reduce the blade noise emission, and therefore incur energy and financial losses to the customer and provider respectively. The reduction of the noise emissions will enable the operator to run the turbines at a higher yield per decibel, generating more energy while remaining within the noise pollution limits.
This will be achieved through the development of a blade trailing edge serration design to later be manufactured and retrofitted onto existing turbines to reduce their noise footprint.
Research of the issue will be heavily based on aero-acoustic experimentation and data capture, to find correlations between flows, noise, and energy losses in the trailing edge flows.
Finally, the research will result in the a number of serrations to be developed and tested for final practical implementation on commercial wind turbines.