Active control of fan noise

In the wake-rotor interaction fan noise, a number of the interacting modes at the blade passing frequency (BPF) and its harmonics are generated which are prescribed by the number of stator and rotor blades etc. In the present study, the dominant mode is tried to be suppressed by the secondary sound from the loudspeaker actuators. One of the novel features of the present system is the adoption of the control board with the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware and the LabVIEW software to synchronize the circumferentially installed loudspeaker actuators with the relative location of rotational blades under arbitrary fan rotational speeds. The experiments were conducted under the conditions of three rotational speeds of 2004, 3150, and 4002 rpm]. The reduction in the sound pressure level (SPL) was observed for all three rotational speeds. The sound pressure level at the BPF was reduced approximately 13 dB] for 2004 rpm] case, but not so large reduction was attained for other cases probably due to the inefficiency of the loudspeaker actuators at high frequencies