Investigation of an active structural acoustic control system on a complex 3D structure

Abstract

Interior noise inside the passenger cabin of ground vehicles can be classified as structure-borne and airborne. The disturbance caused by the engine forces excites the panels enclosing the passenger cabin to vibrate at their resonance frequencies. These vibrating panels cause changes in the sound pressure levels within the passenger cabin, and consequently generating an undesirable booming noise. In this study, we developed a methodology to design an active structural acoustic controller (ASAC) to attenuate the structure-borne noise, which is mainly caused by the most influential radiating panel. The panel is determined by conducting panel acoustic contribution analysis (PACA) based on the acoustic transfer vector (ATV) methodology. Then, active structural acoustic controller is designed for vibration suppression of this panel, which has complex geometry and boundary conditions. The performance of the controller for noise reduction is investigated for various controller parameters and sensor/actuator positions. It is shown that an optimization algorithm is required to determine the optimum controller parameters and sensor/actuator positions to reduce sound pressure levels inside the cabin efficiently.