The performance of active control of random noise in cars

This letter investigates the effectiveness of various configurations of reference sensors for feedforward active control systems in vehicles using unconstrained frequency domain optimization. The results from a model problem are based on a fully coupled analysis between the vibration of a car panel and an enclosed acoustic field. These suggest that with correct locations, only a small number of microphones or accelerometers are needed to give good overall performance, despite many uncorrelated primary disturbances being present. Similar results are predicted from road test data.