Active control of double-glazed windows. Part II: Feedback control

This paper describes an experimental investigation of an actively controlled double-glazed window. It is the second of two companion papers of which the first treated results obtained employing adaptive feedforward control. Herein, the outcome using adaptive feedback control is presented. This adaptive feedback controller has been tested in different configurations, i.e. fully and partially connected controllers. The differences between fully connected controllers with few filter coefficients and partially connected controllers with many filter coefficients are discussed. Additionally, tests with different traffic noise examples have been performed showing the ability of the actively controlled window to enhance protection against traffic noise.     

Binaural active noise control using parametric array loudspeakers

This paper reports the binaural active noise control (ANC) system developed to deal with factory noise. The control points are located in the vicinity of the left and right ears of a worker sitting along the production line. Due to the complicated safety requirements in the factory, secondary sources and error microphones are not allowed to be placed near the worker. Therefore, the proposed ANC system employs the feedforward structure and adopts the parametric array loudspeakers (PALs) as the secondary sources. The PAL is a type of directional loudspeaker that generates a much narrower sound field as compared to the conventional loudspeaker. Once the proposed ANC system has been trained offline, the error microphones can be removed. The performance of the binaural ANC system is successfully demonstrated based on a digital signal processor (DSP) implementation.     

水下流激孔腔噪声前馈有源控制实验研究

水流流经腔体时引起的自激振荡会形成流激噪声,该文通过仿真和实验研究了水下流激孔腔噪声的主动声场控制。应用有源前馈控制方法,对比了参考信号的选取以及控制器中增加的泄露因子对控制结果的影响,并在水循环管路中对流激孔腔噪声前馈控制效果进行了实验验证。研究结果表明,前馈有源噪声控制方法可有效抑制水下流激孔腔噪声,在误差点和辅助观测点都取得了良好的降噪效果,最大降噪量大于8 dB,并且使用腔内信号作为参考的控制效果优于上游信号作为参考。     

军用运输机机舱有源消声实验系统的设计与实现

为验证有源消声技术在军用运输机机舱低频噪声消除方面的有效性,设计和实现了一套机舱有源消声实验系统。采用“激振器+舱壁板”方式实现了飞机螺旋桨对机舱诱导噪声的声源模拟,设计了基于前馈控制结构的自适应有源噪声控制系统,构建了基于FX-LMS算法的自适应消声控制器,采用监测麦克风组对舱内空间的消声效果进行监测。实验结果验证了自适应有源噪声控制技术在军用飞机舱室消声降噪领域的有效性,并表明初、次级声源间距对自适应有源消声系统的消声效果具有重要的影响。     

Active noise control of a diesel generator in a luxury yacht

Active noise control has been applied to a variety of systems in order to improve performance without the increases in size and weight that would otherwise be required by traditional passive noise control treatments. This paper investigates the application of an active noise control system to the control of generator noise in the master cabin of a luxury yacht. A multichannel, multi-tonal active noise control system employing loudspeakers and microphones in the master cabin of the yacht is investigated. It is shown that, due to the high number of engine orders produced by the generator, in order to achieve significantly perceptible levels of noise attenuation it is necessary to control at least 7 individual orders. A controller is investigated which targets 19 engine orders and it is shown to achieve in excess of 5 dB broadband attenuation, whilst achieving up to 23 dB attenuation in individual orders. This corresponds to a 23% reduction in the Zwicker loudness.     

Feedback control of sound transmission through a double glazed window

One way to tackle the control of stochastic noise in three dimensions is to reduce the sound transmission to the zone of interest. In buildings, windows are often the weak link in protecting the interior from outside noise. In particular, double glazed windows have a poor sound insulation at low frequency around the mass-air-mass resonance (double wall resonance). Since passive means for windows are exhausted, an active controller that increases the transmission loss in the low-frequency range is an attractive approach to reduce the noise level in buildings. Previously suggested feedforward controllers need reference microphones to measure the disturbance outside and error microphones for the adaptation somewhere in the room. For a real window this is unpractical or even unfeasible. These limitations can be overcome with the feedback controller presented here, which only uses sensors and actuators in the cavity of the double glazed window. Four different controllers—two feedforward and two feedback strategies—are designed, implemented and compared. With feedback the noise transmission around the mass-air-mass resonance can be reduced by , compared to with a feedforward controller.     

Robust active noise control in the loadmaster area of a military transport aircraft

The active noise control (ANC) method is based on the superposition of a disturbance noise field with a second anti-noise field using loudspeakers and error microphones. This method can be used to reduce the noise level inside the cabin of a propeller aircraft. However, during the design process of the ANC system, extensive measurements of transfer functions are necessary to optimize the loudspeaker and microphone positions. Sometimes, the transducer positions have to be tailored according to the optimization results to achieve a sufficient noise reduction. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a controller design method for such narrow band ANC systems. The method can be seen as an extension of common transducer placement optimization procedures. In the presented method, individual weighting parameters for the loudspeakers and microphones are used. With this procedure, the tailoring of the transducer positions is replaced by adjustment of controller parameters. Moreover, the ANC system will be robust because of the fact that the uncertainties are considered during the optimization of the controller parameters. The paper describes the necessary theoretic background for the method and demonstrates the efficiency in an acoustical mock-up of a military transport aircraft.     

A simplified adaptive feedback active noise control system

In the adaptive feedback active noise control system based on the internal model control (IMC) structure, the reference signal is regenerated by synthesizing the error signal and the secondary signal filtered with the estimation of the secondary path, hence more computation load and extra programming are required. Motivated by the engineering truth that the primary noise cannot be completely cancelled in most practical active noise control applications and the error signal still contains some portions of the primary noise, a simplified adaptive feedback active noise control system is proposed in this paper, which adopts the error signal directly as the reference signal in an adaptive feedforward control system and utilizes the leaky filtered-x LMS algorithm to update the controller. The convergence properties of the proposed system are investigated and its advantages are discussed by comparing with other feedback control systems as well as the weakness. Finally, simulations and experiments are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.     

GA-based optimization of a MIMO ANC system considering coupling of secondary sources in a telephone kiosk

In this paper a multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) active noise control system with the aim of global reduction of broadband noise in a telephone kiosk is addressed. The model selected for this optimization problem is the acoustic environment of an enclosure taking into account the effect of coupling of secondary sources used for control purpose. This optimization involves finding the best locations for loudspeakers and microphones inside the enclosure as well as optimizing the control signals considering secondary source coupling.Previous results show that in order to be able to reduce acoustic noise globally inside the enclosure, the frequency range of 50-300 Hz must be selected for control purpose. The mean of acoustic potential energy of the enclosure, when excited in this frequency range, is adopted as a performance measure. This performance index is penalized with the power of the signal required to excite secondary loudspeakers, in order to avoid placements that may need high voltage power amplifier for a desired performance. To find the solution of this problem, i.e. the global minimum of the performance index, several genetic algorithms are proposed and compared. In order to attain the best achievable performance in reaching the global minimum, the parameters of these genetic algorithms are tuned, and used for optimization purpose. Numerical simulations of the acoustical potential energy as well as the sound pressure at different heights of the kiosk, when active noise control (ANC) system operates, confirm the optimality of the locations proposed by the genetic algorithm.     

Simulation study on active noise control for a 4-T MRI scanner

The purpose of this work is to study computationally the possibility of the application of a hybrid active noise control technique for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acoustic noise reduction. A hybrid control system combined with both feedforward and feedback loops embedded is proposed for potential application on active MRI noise reduction. A set of computational simulation studies were performed. Sets of MRI acoustic noise emissions measured at the patient's left ear location were recorded and used in the simulation study. By comparing three different control systems, namely, the feedback, the feedforward and the hybrid control, our results revealed that the hybrid control system is the most effective. The hybrid control system achieved approximately a 20-dB reduction at the principal frequency component. We concluded that the proposed hybrid active control scheme could have a potential application for MRI scanner noise reduction.     

Active control of aircraft fly-over sound transmission through an open window

This paper presents an experimental work on active control of sound transmission through a restricted opening bottom hinged window. The main goal of the work is to demonstrate the feasibility of the active technique to limit the loss of attenuation due to the aperture of windows, and its application to aircraft fly-over incident noise. The experimental window is placed in an exposed façade of a dwelling close to an airport and subject to fly-by aircraft noise. The active control is configured to cancel the pressure at the aperture using a single-input single-output feedforward adaptive system. As a result, a reduction of sound transmission is achieved with low power consumption. In global terms, an increase of almost 3 dB of transmission loss (with respect to the partially opened window insulation values) in the low frequency range (below 160 Hz and according to the National Danish Method for evaluating low frequency noise) is demonstrated, which is equivalent to a reduction of 50% in the loss of insulation caused by opening the window.     

Interior noise control with an active window system

An active window system to reduce the exterior noise sources, such as traffic noise and construction noise which enter rooms through open windows used for natural ventilation is proposed. The proposed system uses a feedforward control method for active noise control so as not to place the sensors and control sources inside the interior space of the building. For global noise reduction throughout the interior room, the control gains for feedforward control are calculated to minimize the total acoustic power of the new source, which is combined with the noise source corresponding to the open window and control sources on the window frame. The performance of the proposed system for directional exterior noise is confirmed with a scale-model experiment. The experimental results show that the proposed system can achieve a noise reduction of up to 10 dB for the entire room of the scale model regardless of the direction of the incident wave.     

Numerical analysis and passive control of a car side window buffeting noise based on Scale-Adaptive Simulation

Flow over an open side window in a car exhibits similar characteristics as the flow over an open cavity. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation over a cavity was done as a benchmark. The unsteady flow simulation was carried out using Scale Adaptive Simulation (SAS) turbulence model. The benchmark results, frequency and sound pressure levels of feedback and resonance modes, all well matched with the experimental data. Then, with the right rear window, for example, the mechanism of the side window buffeting was investigated. The simulation results show that side window buffeting noise is generated by large scale vortices and in low frequency. Furthermore, buffeting noise characteristics under several patterns of side windows opening were also numerically investigated. As a result, rear window buffeting noise is more severe than that of front window when one window open, and combination pattern of side windows open can reduce buffeting noise. To decrease the interior noise and improve car ride comfort, four suppression measures through adding a side window weather deflector at the A-pillars, constructing a cavity at the B-pillars, combination of the front and rear windows and installing a row of square cylinder deflector at the B-pillars were also studied, respectively. In conclusion, certain noise reduction can be achieved through four passive control methods.     

Adaptive Laguerre filters for active noise control

Feedforward controllers are used in many active noise control (ANC) systems to generate destructive interference in noise fields. An ideal feedforward ANC controller should have an infinite impulse response (IIR) transfer function, but most available feedforward ANC controllers have finite impulse responses (FIR) instead. The main reason is related to the adaptation algorithms of ANC systems. In general, adaptive FIR filters converge faster with guaranteed stability. In this study, the adaptive Laguerre filter is proposed and tested in an ANC application with positive experimental effects. The new ANC controller is an IIR filter, but its adaptation is similar to that of a FIR filter with fast convergence and guaranteed stability. Detailed explanations and analysis are presented in the main text.     

汽车车内噪声主动控制系统仿真

摘要：降低汽车空腔的振动,是抑制汽车车内噪声的有效途径之一。以激振器、作动器和控制器等为主要部件,搭建了简化的汽车车内噪声主动控制系统,该系统通过将汽车空腔模型简化为板件,以减弱板件振动为目标,实现了汽车车内噪声主动控制。采用简谐正弦及余弦信号作为激振器发出的激励,用于模拟板件的初始振动,控制器通过采用模糊控制算法直接控制压电陶瓷作动器的振动,压电陶瓷作动器的振动用于抑制板件的振动,完成了汽车车内噪声主动控制系统仿真。仿真结果表明,研究采用的汽车车内噪声主动控制系统,使汽车空腔振动降低23%,为解决由汽车发动机和动力总成的振动所引发的汽车车内噪声问题提供了一个有效途径。     

Performance of an independent planar virtual sound barrier at the opening of a rectangular enclosure

Planar virtual sound barrier systems have been used successfully to reduce noise radiation through an opening without affecting natural ventilation and lighting. However, the complexity of a fully coupled control system grows at the rate proportional to the square of the number of channels and this make the system implementation become impractical for enclosures with large openings. To reduce the system complexity, this paper proposes an independent planar virtual sound barrier, which is a multi-channel system consisting of many independent single channel active noise control systems. Each single channel system is “independent” in the sense that the control source output of the system is updated only with the signal from its own error sensor. Based on the analytical model of sound radiation through the opening of a rectangular enclosure, the transfer functions from both primary and control sources are calculated first. Then the noise reduction performance, the stability, and the convergence behavior of both fully coupled and independent planar virtual sound barrier systems are investigated. It is found that the independent system with no control output constraint becomes inherently unstable at some frequencies; however its stability can be improved by applying some control output constraint. Reducing the number of channels and the distance between secondary loudspeakers and error microphones can also increase system stability but at the cost of smaller noise reduction. When the system is inherently stable and there is no constraint on control output, the independent system can provide the same noise reduction as the fully coupled one but with faster convergence speed.     

H∞ Feedback control and Fx-LMS feedforward control for car engine vibration attenuation

The attenuation of the low frequency noise produced by the car engine vibration has been the major concern of the automotive community with the objective to increase the comfort of the driver and the passengers. The chassis subframe is the part responsible for transmission of the engine vibration to the car body through the engine mounts. At the beginning of this paper, we briefly describe the test rig we used and which has been experimentally investigated by using system identification. Then the experimental results of the feedforward control strategy and the achieved performance are briefly presented. These results are then compared to the feedback control method utilizing H_∞ strategy which allows us to design a robust controller requiring less sensors. Furthermore, a broadband noise attenuation could be achieved by using a robust feedback controller in the real time test.     

Causality study on a feedforward active noise control headset with different noise coming directions in free field

A systematic analysis is proposed to predict the performance of a typical feedforward single channel ANC headset in terms of the delay, especially the non-causal delay caused by different noise coming directions. First, the performance of a non-causal feedforward system for a band-limited noise is analyzed by using a simplified pure delay model, where it is found that the noise reduction bandwidth is narrowed and the maximum noise reduction is decreased with the increase of the non-causal delay. Second, a systematic method is developed, which can be used to predict the system performance with measured primary and secondary path transfer functions in most practical sound fields and to study the effects of the control filter length and the path delay on the performance. Then, the causality of a typical feedforward active noise control headset with the primary source at 0° and 90° positions in an anechoic chamber is analyzed, and the performance for the two locations predicted by the systematic analysis is shown in good agreements with the experiment results. Finally, an experiment of a typical feedforward active noise control headset in a reverberation chamber is carried out, which shows the validity of the proposed systematic analysis for other more practical sound fields.     

Hybrid active and passive control of fan noise

This paper deals with the global reduction of axial flow fan noise in ducts in a building using a hybrid passive-active noise control method. The effectiveness of using an infra-red device as a reference signal source is also investigated. It is shown that using such a hybrid noise control system over an axial-flow fan reduces the overall sound pressure level by 5 dB(A) in the surrounding environment and global control of the blade passing frequency can also be achieved. This paper also shows that using an infra-red device as a reference signal source produces marginally better control as compared with using a microphone reference sensor. Moreover, long term stability is guaranteed and the possibility of acoustic feedback is eliminated.     

基于道路限速策略的规划路网噪声控制*

为缓解交通噪声污染,研究限速方案对噪声的影响,考虑道路限速策略下的阻抗函数,建立基于道路限速的随机用户均衡模型并实现路网交通分配,对规划路网在不同限速策略下的噪声控制规律进行研究。案例结果表明：道路限速控制对象应选取噪声影响道路;道路限速策略控制噪声的主要因素在于降低影响道路上出行车辆的出行速度,控制区域噪声值与路网总出行时间呈线性关系,道路限速80%的情况下,控制区域噪声和路网总出行时间分别降低2.94dB和增加0.66%;路网总噪声排放存在两种不同变化趋势,且与道路等级,绕行系数相关。研究可为从道路规划角度实现交通噪声控制提供有效参考。