Interior Acoustic Control System Using Boundary Vibration with Giant Magnetostrictive Actuator: Fundamental Consideration on the Control Algorithm

Objectives: In case of medical emergency, an ambulance uses siren (which produces noise up to 120 dB) to alert the traffic on the road to give way. However, siren noise is troublesome to the patient lying inside. This calls for noise control inside the ambulance. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The passive noise control methods are not feasible and economically inviable so active noise control (ANC) method is applied. The ANC is electro-acoustic technique in which the noise signal is acquired and noise with opposite phase is produced and overlapped on input noise to suppress the same. The weights are updated using adaptive algorithms so as to reduce the error in ANC system. In present work, least mean square (LMS) and filtered- reference least mean square (FxLMS) algorithm based ANC systems are applied and compared for ambulance siren noise reduction. MATLAB is used for simulating the ANC systems. Findings: Both the algorithms are compared on the basis of residual noise and smoothened ensemble average square error (SEASE). From the results, it is found that both algorithms LMS and FxLMS are good in noise reduction. The noise reduction for FxLMS based ANC system is 28 dB whereas it is 25 dB for LMS based ANC system, which indicates the superiority of FxLMS algorithm over LMS algorithm. The results are obtained analytically as well as indicated by power spectral density (PSD) plots of the residual noise. The comparison of SEASE for both algorithms also indicates better performance for FxLMS algorithm. The ANC system based on FxLMS algorithm is more stable as it considers the secondary path which includes practical components such as ADC, DAC, etc. Applications/Improvements: The results indicate that FxLMS algorithm based on ANC system can be implemented on the hardware using DSP processor. It can be further used for the other applications of noise reduction such as server noise, vacuum cleaner, etc. Keywords: Active Noise Control, Ambulance Siren Noise, FxLMS Algorithm, LMS

Multichannel active noise control (ANC) systems have been investigated to reduce outdoor low-frequency noise, such as power transformer noise and traffic noise. However, in outdoor environments, wind noise is inevitable and significantly degrades the noise reduction performance of active control systems. Despite broad adoption in windy environments, porous microphone windscreens cannot eliminate low-frequency wind noise in microphones, especially when the wind speed is high. Assuming wind noise is additive and uncorrelated with the primary noise to be controlled, this paper analyses how the wind noise detected by the reference microphone impacts the control filters and the residual noise of a multichannel ANC system based on the multichannel filtered-reference least mean squares algorithm (MFxLMS). By extending our recent research on wind noise suppression in single-channel active noise control systems [Y. Chu, et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 152(6), 3340–3345 (2022)], a modified MFxLMS algorithm based on a new cost function is proposed. Simulations with real-recorded wind noise are performed to verify the theoretical analysis.

The demand for noise reduction inside a vehicle has been recently increasing in the pursuit of improved ride comfort. In consideration of requirement of quietness improvement and reduction of weight, an active noise control (ANC) system has been attracting much attention. This method is effective for noise with low frequency. In this study, we propose an ANC system by using the vibration of giant magnetostrictive actuator and we aim to reduce the noise level in an interior of a vehicle using this proposed ANC system. The giant magnetostrictive actuator has a high output that is sufficiently controllable inside a vehicle space and at the same time has high space efficiency. In this paper, the giant magnetostrictive actuator is installed at windshield of the enclosure that act as a vehicle, and the noise reduction effect to ANC were examined as the noise applied to the box from outside.

The method of reducing automotive intake noise can be classified by passive and active control techniques. However, passive control has a limited effect of noise reduction at low frequency range (below 500 Hz) and is limited by the space of the engine room. However, active control can overcome these passive control limitations. The active control technique mostly uses the Least-Mean-Square (LMS) algorithm, because the LMS algorithm can easily obtain the complex transfer function in real-time, particularly when the Filtered-X LMS (FXLMS) algorithm is applied to an active noise control (ANC) system. However, the convergence performance of the LMS algorithm decreases significantly when the FXLMS algorithm is applied to the active control of intake noise under rapidly accelerating driving conditions. Therefore, in this study, the Co-FXLMS algorithm was proposed to improve the control performance of the FXLMS algorithm during rapid acceleration. The Co-FXLMS algorithm is realized by using an estimate of the cross correlation between the adaptation error and the filtered input signal to control the step size. The performance of the Co-FXLMS algorithm is presented in comparison with that of the FXLMS algorithm. Experimental results show that active noise control using Co-FXLMS is effective in reducing automotive intake noise during rapid acceleration.

Multichannel feedforward active noise control system combined with noise source separation by microphone arrays

The ultra-compact electric vehicle (EV) has advanced characteristics such as compactness, wright body and high response driving. In addition, the ultra-compact EV uses electric motor instead of a gasoline engine. Therefore, it is low impact for environment. However, the noise into the vehicles mainly consists of road and wind noise from the tires and during driving. To solve the interior sound problem, we focused on a giant magnetostrictive actuator that is small and able to generate a high output sound, and we propose an active noise control (ANC) system using wall vibration generated by the GMA, thereby achieving a silencing effect. In this paper, we created an analysis model of the giant magnetostrictive actuator and considered magnetostrictive force and the characteristics of the proposed giant magnetostrictive actuator by electromagnetic field analysis.

The objective of this research project is to develop an Active Noise Control (ANC) system based on the Filtered-X Least Mean Square algorithm. The ANC system developed here will be installed in a rocket engine testing facility of SpaceX Company near McGregor, Texas. As the SpaceX Company’s rocket engines have been increased in their powers, the engine noise from the testing facility is increasing rapidly. Although there is no noise complain currently from the nearby communities in McGregor, concerns are expected in the near future that the noise could possibly disturb people in McGregor. The ANC system can reduce the noise level using a few microphones and speakers connected to a DSP frontend, while a Passive Noise Control system would be much larger and require a higher cost to be implemented. This ANC system is currently implemented as a Single Input and Single Output system in a laboratory, effectively reducing the noise generated from a loudspeaker driven by the recorded rocket engine noise signal. Then, the system will be improved and operated as a Multiple Inputs and Multiple Outputs system to successfully adapt various wind, temperature, and humidity changes, leading to the maximum noise reduction toward McGregor.

Based on the theoretical analysis of literature, saturation in measured signal of active noise control (ANC) systems will degrade the convergence speed. However, the experiments show that the saturated input signal can speed up the convergence of the narrow-band ANC systems. This paper intends to remodel the saturation effects for feedforward and feedback ANC systems. Combining the action of analog-to-digital converters (ADC), the mathematical expression and block diagrams are proposed to model the saturation effects in the practical ANC systems. The derivation and simulation results show that since the saturation is able to amplify the principle component of signal, the convergence would be speeded up.

This paper proposes a method for shortening the distance from a noise detection microphone to a loudspeaker forming the feedforward type of active noise control (ANC) system. In the ANC system, the primary noise detected by the noise detection microphone and the secondary noise provided by the loudspeaker is required simultaneously arriving at another microphone, called error microphone, monitoring the effect of the active noise control. However, the reverberation involved in the secondary path from the loudspeaker to the error microphone increase the secondary noise components arriving later than the primary noise. The late components are not only invalid for cancelling the primary noise but also impede the cancellation. This paper hence proposes a method reducing the components by forming the noise control filter synthesizing the secondary noise with the cascade connection of an infinite and a finite impulse response filters. The distance can be thereby shortened.

Infant incubators are widely used in neonatal intensive care units (NICU) for the pre-term or sick babies. In this paper, we propose an active noise control (ANC) system integrated with infant cry detection and classification function for infant incubators. The incubator ANC system reduces the high noise level which results in numerous adverse health effects for infants, and the cry detector and analyzer monitors the infants' physical conditions using the same ANC system hardware. The infant crying signals picked up by the error microphone of ANC inside the incubator are detected, the signals' features are extracted by using linear prediction coding (LPC), and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) methods. The database of different signals and their associated infant health features will be established through training phase. The signal classification algorithm is based on shortest distance and Bayesian classifier. Simulation is conducted to evaluate the performance of proposed system using a Giraffe incubator from GE Healthcare. The experiments show that the proposed ANC system can reduce the harmful noise and the cry classification algorithm can recognize infant cries in order to develop the innovative, low cost methods to monitor the infant's health conditions.

It is important to remove large environmental noise in measurement using SQUIDs without magnetic shielding. Here, the environmental noise has been reduced by an active noise control (ANC) system in the MHz radio-frequency region. The ANC system including a phase and amplitude control circuit has been designed to allow precise adjustments of the phase and the amplitude of the anti-phase wave against the noise waves in the MHz region. In this paper, a sinusoidal wave in the MHz range was used as the radio frequency interference. When a SQUID was used for a signal detector, the ANC system suppressed this sinusoidal wave to the white noise level by about 54 dB. The performance of the ANC system for the chemical detection by nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) was checked in a simulated environment. One was the case of a real AM radio broadcasting signal with the dummy NQR signal and another was the real NQR signal with a sinusoidal wave as noise. For both cases, the ANC showed good performance for MHz range noise cancellation.

Electronic delay has been a critical problem in active noise control (ANC) systems. This is true whether a feedforward structure or a feedback structure is adopted. In particular, excessive delays would create a causality problem in a feedforward ANC system of a finite-length duct. This paper suggests a multirate signal-processing approach for minimizing the electronic delay in the control loop. In this approach, digital controllers are required in decimation and interpolation of discrete-time signals. The computation efficiency is further enhanced by a polyphase method, where the phases of low-pass finite impulse response (FIR) filters must be carefully designed to avoid unnecessary delays. Frequency domain optimization procedures based on H1, H2, and Hinfinity norms, respectively, are utilized in the FIR filter design. The proposed method was implemented by using a floating-point digital signal processor. Experimental results showed that the multirate approach remains effective for suppressing a broadband (200-600 Hz) noise in a duct with a minimum upstream measurement microphone placement of 20 cm.

In practical active noise control (ANC) systems, the primary path and the secondary path may be nonlinear and time-varying. It has been reported that the linear techniques used to control such ANC systems exhibit degradation in performance. In addition, the actuators of an ANC system very often have nonminimum-phase response. A linear controller under such situations yields poor performance. A novel functional link artificial neural network (FLANN)-based simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) algorithm, which functions as a nonlinear mode-free (MF) controller, is proposed in this paper. Computer simulations have been carried out to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the standard filtered-x least mean square (FXLMS) algorithm, and performs better than the recently proposed filtered-s least mean square (FSLMS) algorithm when the secondary path is time-varying. This observation implies that the SPSA-based MF controller can eliminate the need of the modeling of the secondary path for the ANC system.

In conventional active noise control (ANC) system, the primary noise is attenuated over the frequency band of interest based simply on the error signal, which does not take into account the human perception of noise. Hence, researchers have developed psychoacoustic ANC system to improve its noise reduction performance from psychoacoustic point of view. However, in this psychoacoustic ANC system, there may be a disturbance that is uncorrelated with the primary noise at the error sensor, which can severely degrade the system's noise reduction performance. Hence, in this paper, a psychoacoustic hybrid ANC system is proposed, which can simultaneously control both the correlated primary noise and uncorrelated disturbance from psychoacoustic point of view. Loudness is used as the psychoacoustic criterion for evaluating the system's noise reduction performance. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed psychoacoustic hybrid ANC system.

Active control of road noise considering the vibro-acoustic transfer path of a passenger car