Local active noise control systems generate a zone of quiet at the physical error sensor location. While significant attenuation is achieved at the error sensor, local noise control is not without its problems, chiefly that the zone of quiet is generally small and impractically sized. It may be inconvenient to place the error sensor at the desired location of attenuation, such as near an observer’s ear, preventing the small zone of quiet from being centered there. To overcome the problems encountered in local active noise control, virtual acoustic sensors have been developed to shift the zone of quiet away from the physical sensor position to a spatially fixed desired location. The general aim of the research presented in this thesis is to improve and extend the spatially fixed and moving virtual sensing algorithms developed for active noise control thus far and hence increase the scope and application of local active noise control systems. To achieve this research aim, a number of novel spatially fixed and moving virtual sensing algorithms are presented for local active noise control. In this thesis, a spatially fixed virtual sensing technique named the Stochastically Optimal Tonal Diffuse Field (SOTDF) virtual sensing method is developed specifically for use in pure tone diffuse sound fields. The SOTDF virtual sensing method is a fixed gain virtual sensing method that does not require a preliminary identification stage nor models of the complex transfer functions between the error sensors and the sources. SOTDF virtual microphones and virtual energy density sensors that use both pressure and pressure gradient sensors are developed using the SOTDF virtual sensing method. The performance of these SOTDF virtual sensors is investigated in numerical simulations and using experimental measurements made in a reverberation chamber. SOTDF virtual sensors are shown to accurately estimate the pressure and pressure gradient at a virtual location and to effectively shift the zone of quiet away from the physical sensors to the virtual location. In numerically simulated and post-processed experimental control, both virtual microphones and virtual energy density sensors achieve higher attenuation at the virtual location than conventional control strategies employing their physical counterpart. As it is likely that the desired location of attenuation is not spatially fixed, a number of moving virtual sensing algorithms are also developed in this thesis. These moving virtual sensing algorithms generate a virtual microphone that tracks the desired location of attenuation as it moves through a three-dimensional sound field. To determine the level of attenuation that can be expected at the ear of a seated observer in practice, the performance of the moving virtual sensing algorithms in generating a moving zone of quiet at the single ear of a rotating artificial head is investigated in real-time experiments conducted in a modally dense three dimensional cavity. Results of real-time experiments demonstrate that moving virtual sensors provide improved attenuation at the moving virtual location compared to either fixed virtual sensors or fixed physical sensors. As an acoustic energy density cost function spatially extends the zone of quiet generated at the sensor location, a fixed three-dimensional virtual acoustic energy density sensing method is also developed for use in a modally dense three-dimensional sound field. The size of the localised zone of quiet achieved by minimising either the acoustic energy density or the squared pressure at the virtual location with the active noise control system is compared in real-time experiments conduced in a modally dense three-dimensional cavity. Experimental results demonstrate that minimising the virtual acoustic energy density provides improved attenuation in the sound field and a larger 10 dB zone of quiet at the virtual location than virtual microphones. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1522526 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Mechanical Engineering, 2010

Driven by the need to reduce the sound transmitted into aircraft cabins from the power plant, this thesis investigates the active control of sound transmitted through a structure into coupled enclosures. In particular, it examines alternatives to conventional microphone and accelerometer error sensors. This study establishes a design framework for the development and analysis of an active noise control system which can be applied to any complex vibro-acoustic system. The design approach has focused on using techniques presently used in industry to enable the transfer of the active noise control technology from the research stage into practical noise control systems. The structural and acoustic sub-systems are modelled using FEA to estimate the in vacuo structural modal response of the structure and the acoustic pressure modal response (with rigid boundary conditions) of the interior cavity. The acoustic and structural systems are then coupled using modal coupling theory. Within this framework, two novel error sensors aimed at overcoming observability problems suffered by traditional microphone and accelerometer sensors are investigated: namely, acoustic energy density sensors and shaped radiation modal vibration sensors. The principles of the measurement of energy density are discussed and the errors arising from its measurement using two and three-microphone sensor configurations are considered for a one-dimensional reactive sound field and a plane wave sound field. The error analysis encompasses finite separation effects, instrumentation errors (phase and sensitivity mismatches, and physical length errors), diffraction and interference effects, and other sources of error (mean flow and turbulence, temperature and humidity, statistical effects). Following the one-dimensional study, four 3-axis energy density sensor designs are proposed and error analysis is conducted over the same acoustic fields as for the one-dimensional study. The design and construction of the simplest arrangement of the 4 three-axis sensors is discussed with reference to design issues, performance and limitations. The strategy of using energy density control is investigated numerically for a purely acoustic system and a coupled panel-cavity system. Energy density control is shown to provide greater local and global control compared to that possible using an equivalent number of microphones. The performance of the control system is shown to be relatively insensitive to the placement of the energy density sensor. For an enclosed cavity system with high modal overlap, the zone of local control achieved by minimising energy density is found to be approximately the same as the zone of local control obtained when min-imising pressure and pressure gradient in a diffuse sound field. It is also shown that if there is only one control source used per energy density sensor, global control will be almost optimum. The addition of further control sources leads to an improvement in global control, however, the control is no longer optimal. The control system is found to be very tolerant of errors in the estimate of the energy density and thus the use of simpler energy density sensor designs is justified. Finally, an experiment is presented in which the global performance achieved by controlling a three-axis energy density sensor is compared with the performance achieved by minimising the acoustic potential energy and minimising the sum of squared pressures at a finite number of microphones. The experimental results are found to reflect the numerical results. The active minimisation of harmonic sound transmission into an arbitrarily shaped enclosure using error signals derived from structural vibration sensors is investigated numerically and experimentally. It is shown that by considering the dynamics of the coupled system, it is possible to derive a set of "e;structural radiation"e; modes which are orthogonal with respect to the global potential energy of the coupled acoustic space and which can be sensed by structural vibration sensors. Minimisation of the amplitudes of the "e;radiation modes"e; is thus guaranteed to minimise the interior acoustic potential energy. The coupled vibro-acoustic system under investigation is modelled using Finite Element Analysis which allows systems with complex geometries to be investigated rather than limiting the analysis to simple, analytically tractable systems. Issues regarding the practical implementation of sensing the orthonormal sets of structural radiation modes are discussed. Specific examples relating to the minimisation of the total acoustic potential energy within a curved rectangular panel and a coupled cavity are given, comparing the performance offered using vibration sensing of the radiation modes on the structure with the more traditional error sensing; namely, the discrete sensing of the structural kinetic energy on the structural boundary and the acoustic potential energy in the enclosed space approximated by the mean squared pressures at several locations. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Mechanical Engineering, 1999.

The properties of acoustic kinetic energy density and total energy density of sound fields in lightly damped enclosures have been explored thoroughly in the literature. Their increased spatial uniformity makes them more favorable measurement quantities for various applications than acoustic potential energy density (or squared pressure), which is most often used. In this dissertation, a new acoustic energy quantity, the generalized acoustic energy density (GED), will be introduced. It is defined by introducing weighting factors, α and 1 − α, in the formulation of total acoustic energy density. With the additional degree of freedom, the GED can conform to the traditional acoustic energy density quantities, or be optimized for different applications. The properties and applications of the GED are explored in this dissertation. For enclosed sound fields, it was found that GED with α = 1/4 is spatially more uniform than the acoustic potential energy density, acoustic kinetic energy density, and the total acoustic energy density, which makes it a more favorable measurement quantity than those traditional acoustic energy density quantities for many indoor measurement applications. For some other applications, such as active noise control in diffuse field, different values of α may be considered superior. The numerical verifications in this research are mainly based on a hybrid modal expansion developed for this work, which combines the free field Green's function and a modal expansion. The enclosed sound field is separated into the direct field and reverberant field, which have been treated together in traditional modal analysis. Studies on a point source in rectangular enclosures show that the hybrid modal expansion converges notably faster than the traditional modal expansions, especially in the region near the source, and introduces much smaller errors with a limited number of modes. The hybrid modal expansion can be easily applied to complex sound sources if the free field responses of the sources are known. Damped boundaries are also considered in this dissertation, and a set of modified modal functions is introduced, which is shown to be suitable for many damped boundary conditions.

Measurements in a reverberation chamber use spatially averaged squared pressure to calculate sound absorption, sound power, and other sound measurements. While a reverberation chamber provides an approximation of a diffuse sound field, variations in the measurements introduce uncertainty in measurement results. Room qualification procedures require a sufficient number of source-receiver locations to obtain suitable measurements. The total acoustic energy density provides greater spatial uniformity than squared pressure, which requires fewer source-receiver positions to produce similar or better accuracy in measurement results. This paper explores the possibility of using energy density in place of squared pressure, using methods outlined in current ISO standards, by describing several experimental and analytical results.

An active noise control (ANC) system has been applied to the problem of attenuating low-frequency tonal noise inside small enclosures. The intended target application of the system was the reduction of the engine firing frequency inside heavy equipment cabins. The ANC system was based on a version of the filtered-x LMS adaptive algorithm, modified for the minimization of acoustic energy density (ED), rather than the more traditional minimization of squared acoustic pressure (SP). Three loudspeakers produced control signals within a mock cabin composed of a steel frame with plywood sides and a Plexiglas® front. An energy density sensor, capable of measuring acoustic pressure as well as acoustic particle velocity, provided the error signal to the control system. The ANC system operated on a single reference signal, which, for experiments involving recorded tractor engine noise, was derived from the engine's tachometer signal. For the low frequencies at which engine firing occurs, experiments showed that ANC systems minimizing ED and SP both provided significant attenuation of the tonal noise near the operator's head and globally throughout the small cabin. The tendency was for ED control to provide a more spatially uniform amount of reduction than SP control, especially at the higher frequencies investigated (up to 200 Hz). In dynamic measurement conditions, with a reference signal swept in frequency, the ED control often provided superior results, struggling less at frequencies for which the error sensor was near nodal regions for acoustic pressure. A single control channel often yielded performance comparable to that of two control channels, and sometimes produced superior results in dynamic tests. Tonal attenuation achieved by the ANC system was generally in excess of 20 dB and reduction in equivalent sound level for dynamic tonal noise often exceeded 4 dB at the error sensor. It was shown that temperature changes likely to be encountered in practice have little effect on the initial delay through the secondary control path, and are therefore unlikely to significantly impact ANC system stability in the event that a fixed set of system identification filter coefficients are employed.