Estimation and global control of noise reflections

Abstract

In theory, active control could be used to reduce the unwanted noise reflections from surfaces such as a submarine hull or the walls of an anechoic room. In the recent years, a real-time algorithm has been developed to this effect at the Laboratoire de Mécanique et d'Acoustique: the noise scattered by the surface is estimated through linear filtering of acoustic pressure signals provided by ordinary microphones and an adaptive feedforward algorithm minimizes the resulting error signals. The paper summarizes the theory underlying the control algorithm, which stems from the integral representation of the scattered pressure, and presents the successive experiments which have been conducted with it: control of terminal reflections in a duct, control of the noise scattered by a parallelepiped in an anechoic room, estimation of the noise reflections on the walls of a small room. It appears that an accurate identification of the linear filters that account for the surface scattering leads to an effective estimation and control of the scattered noise. Facilities allowing such an accurate estimation of the scattered noise are suggested for a future anechoic room where active devices would deal with the wall reflections in the 20-100Hz frequency range.