Development of a Pseudo-uniform Structural Quantity for Use in Active Structural Acoustic Control

Abstract

Active structural acoustic control has been an area of increasing interest over the past decade with an increase in the search for a suitable error quantity. Current errors require the use of large amounts of accelerometers distributed across the entire structure to provide a suitable estimate of the volume velocity, as research has shown this quantity to be highly related to the overall acoustic radiation. Other methods involve a previous knowledge of the number of contributing acoustic radiation modes as well as an array of accelerometers to extract these modes. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a new structural quantity which when used in an active control situation attenuates the acoustic radiation over a large range of frequencies. The benefits of this technique are that it involves only a single point measurement and the placement of this sensor on the structure is fairly arbitrary. The results given are based on a simply supported plate and are purely analytical.