Multichannel control systems for the attenuation of interior road noise in vehicles

This paper considers the active control of road noise in vehicles, using either multichannel feedback control, with both headrest and floor positioned microphones providing feedback error signals, or multichannel feedforward control, in which reference signals are provided by the microphones on the vehicle floor and error signals are provided by the microphones mounted on the headrests. The formulation of these control problems is shown to be similar if the constraints of robust stability, limited disturbance enhancement and open-loop stability are imposed. A novel formulation is presented for disturbance enhancement in multichannel systems, which limits the maximum enhancement of each individual error signal. The performance of these two systems is predicted using plant responses and disturbance signals measured in a small city car. The reduction in the sum of the squared pressure signals at the four error microphones for both systems is found to be up to 8 dB at low frequencies and 3 dB on average, where the sound level is particularly high from 80 to 180 Hz. The performance of both systems is found to be robust to measured variations in the plant responses. The enhancements in the disturbance at higher frequencies are smaller for the feedback controller than for the feedforward controller, although the performance of the feedback controller is more significantly reduced by the introduction of additional delay in the plant response.