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

This paper presents an efficient approach to select the reference sensor position in active control of road noise by considering the vibro-acoustic transfer path of a passenger car. To ensure sufficient noise attenuation in active road noise control, the reference signals should be correlated with vehicle interior noise signals. To achieve this aim, the vibro-acoustic transfer path delivers promising options. An appropriate number of reference signals have generally been obtained by principal component analysis. Then reference sensor positions have been determined by evaluating a large number of candidate locations on a car from a coherence perspective. However, this task is time-consuming and inefficient in the actual vehicle development process. Furthermore, in practice, it is challenging to obtain a highly coherent reference signal for road noise with broadband noise characteristics without understanding the characteristics of the road noise transmitted to the interior of the vehicle. In this study, a structural transfer path analysis was conducted to derive the primary vibro-acoustic paths of structural road noise, and the optimum positions of the reference sensors were determined through the analysis of path contribution and vibro-acoustic transfer function. A practical active noise control system was implemented with the remote microphone technique based on a vehicle audio system to validate the noise attenuation performance. The experiments demonstrated an average attenuation of 3.4 dB at the driver and rear right-hand-side seat positions for up to 400 Hz frequencies. This approach is expected to increase the efficiency in developing active road noise control systems based on adaptive feedforward control systems. (c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.