Simulation and design of active control systems for acoustic pulse noise

Active noise control (ANC) techniques have been successfully investigated and implemented for the attenuation of stationary acoustic noise. Furthermore, adaptive methods for impulsive noise have been also presented in the literature, even though the considered statistical models are well suited only for a narrow class of impulsive disturbances that can be faced in realistic scenarios. In this paper, a preliminary study addressing the design of a non-adaptive deterministic ANC system for pulse signals is developed by avoiding any statistical assumption. The theory of Wave Field Synthesis is explicitly exploited in a destructive manner, that is, generating a canceling acoustic pressure field by means of arrays of secondary sources. An ad-hoc interactive software simulator implementing the proposed approach is realized and used to virtually explore the solution spaces of some test case scenarios. Simulations’ results considering linear and planar arrays in the case of free space propagation, as well as in the case of interaction with a hard ground, are presented and compared. Furthermore, the impact of different design solutions proposed to mitigate the impairments due to terrain reflections is evaluated. © 2017, Springer-Verlag France.