A Feedforward Active Noise Control System for Ducts Using a Passive Silencer to Reduce Acoustic Feedback

Ventilation systems installed in buildings usually generate low-frequency noise because the passive silencers commonly used to attenuate the ventilation noise are not effective in the lowfrequency range. A method proven to effectively reduce low-frequency noise in a wide variety of applications is active noise control (ANC). A feedforward ANC system applied to duct noise normally uses a reference microphone, a control unit, a loudspeaker to generate the secondary noise created by the controller, and an error microphone. The secondary noise generated by the loudspeaker will travel both downstream canceling the primary noise, and upstream to the reference microphone, i.e. acoustic feedback. The acoustic feedback may result in performance reduction and stability problems of the control system. Common approaches to solve the feedback problem result in more complex controller structures and/or system configurations than the simple feedforward controller, e.g. introducing a feedback cancellation filter in the controller in parallel with the acoustic feedback path, or using a dual-microphone reference sensing system. This paper presents a simple approach to reduce the acoustic feedback by using a basic feedforward controller in combination with a passive silencer. Simulations show that efficient acoustic feedback cancellation is achieved by using a passive silencer. In the experimental setup another advantage with using a passive silencer is that the frequency response function of the forward path, which is to be estimated, is smoother, i.e. most of the dominant frequency peaks in the frequency response function when not using a passive silencer is reduced. This in turn results in an acoustic path that is less complex to estimate with high accuracy using an adaptive FIR filter steered with the LMS algorithm.