Author Description

The prospect of the active control of noise has intrigued, and frustrated, scientists and engineers in many countries for over five decades. The basic idea is relatively simple: to artificially generate a secondary acoustic field that destructively interferes with the field produced by the unwanted sound. However the limitations of the available electronic technology have restricted practical realization to a few simple applications. With the development of flexible and cheap digital signal processing devices, capable of processing signals within the audio range, there has been a resurgence in interest in the theory and practice of developing active noise control systems. Further, the flexibility of these devices allows the developer to concentrate on the design procedure and corresponding control algorithms, rather than the acoustic properties of the arrangements. This book provides an introduction to the design of such systems from the perspective of control engineering. The approach allows the designer to predict the performance of the system in advance and reduces the empirical aspect of many previous approaches. The use of control engineering methods moreover permits the progressive development of various control techniques--from fixed digital control to self-tuning adaptive control--to be realized within a single coherent framework.