Active Noise Control with a Single Nonlinear Control Filter for a Vibrating Plate with Multiple Actuators

Vibrating plates can be used in Active Noise Control (ANC) applications as active barriers or as
secondary sources replacing classical loudspeakers. The system with vibrating plates, especially when
nonlinear MFC actuators are used, is nonlinear. The nonlinearity in the system reduces performance of
classical feedforward ANC with linear control filters systems, because they cannot cope with harmonics
generated by the nonlinearity. The performance of the ANC system can be improved by using nonlinear
control filters, such as Artificial Neural Networks or Volterra filters.
However, when multiple actuators are mounted on a single plate, which is a common practice to provide
effective control of more vibration modes, each actuator should be driven by a dedicated nonlinear control
filter. This significantly increases computational complexity of the control algorithm, because adaptation
of nonlinear control filters is much more computationally demanding than adaptation of linear FIR filters.
This paper presents an ANC system with multiple actuators, which are driven with a single nonlinear
filter. To avoid destructive interference of vibrations generated by different actuators the control signal is
filtered by appropriate separate linear filters. The control system is experimentally verified and obtained
results are reported.