Structural vibration control for broadband noise attenuation in enclosures

This paper develops and evaluates several strategies for structural vibration control with the objective of attenuating broadband noise inside a rectangular enclosure. The strategies evaluated include model-independent collocated control, model-based feedback control and a new “modal-estimate” feedback strategy. Collocated control requires no knowledge of model parameters and enjoys the advantage of robustness. However, effective broadband noise attenuation with colocated control requires a large number of sensor-actuator pairs. Model-based controllers, on the other hand, can be theoretically effective even with the use of a single actuator. However, they suffer from a lack of robustness and are unsuitable from a practical point of view for broadband structural vibration applications where the dynamic models are of large order and poorly known. A new control strategy is developed based on attenuating a few structural vibration modes that have the best coupling with the enclosure acoustics. Broadband attenuation of these important modes can be achieved using a single actuator, a limited number of accelerometers and limited knowledge of a few modal functions. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed strategy.