Efficiency Testing of Active Noise Control by Acoustic Field Modeling

The efficiency of active noise control (ANC) is largely dependent on the arrangement of the microphones and loudspeakers, and the acoustic environment as well. The paper presents a simulation tool, which allows the performance evaluation of ANC systems without the difficulty of physical experiments. The proposed simulation integrates sound field calculation and noise control. Field calculation is based on robust FDTD techniques, while the discrete time controller is realized in a usual way. The simulation is performed in three stages. First the program determines the discrete transfer function models of the acoustic paths between specific points of interest. In the next stage the controller’s operation is evaluated without field simulation. Having the steady state parameters of the adaptive controller, the field simulation is re-run for the reverberation time providing the sound pressure map. Sound field calculation is implemented on modern GPGPU devices. A series of ANC experiments were compared to the results of the simulations, and they prove the applicability of our simulation method in a convincing manner.