Active Control of Sound for Composite Regions

We present a methodology for the active control of time-harmonic wave fields, e.g., acoustic disturbances, in composite regions. This methodology extends our previous approach developed for the case of arcwise connected regions. The overall objective is to eliminate the effect of all outside field sources on a given domain of interest, i.e., to shield this domain. In this context, active shielding means introducing additional field sources, called active controls, that generate the annihilating signal and cancel out the unwanted component of the field. As such, the problem of active shielding can be interpreted as a special inverse source problem for the governing differential equation or system. For a composite domain, not only do the controls prevent interference from all exterior sources, but they can also enforce a predetermined communication pattern between the individual subdomains (as many as desired). In other words, they either allow the subdomains to communicate freely with one another or otherwise have them shielded from their peers. In the paper, we obtain a general solution for the composite active shielding problem and show that it reduces to solving a collection of auxiliary problems for arcwise connected domains. The general solution is constructed in two stages. Namely, if a particular subdomain is not allowed to hear another subdomain, then the supplementary controls are employed first. They communicate the required data prior to building the final set of controls. The general solution can be obtained with only the knowledge of the acoustic signals propagating through the boundaries of the subdomains. No knowledge of the field sources is required, nor is any knowledge of the properties of the medium needed.