Adaptive personal active noise system
AssigneeVirginia Tech Intellectual Properties, Inc.
InventorsWilliam Richard Saunders, Michael Allen Vaudrey
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
An improved personal noise attenuation system which attenuates both tonal and broadband sound and which includes a spatially adjustable acousto-electric sensor and attenuation means including both feedback and feed forward components so as to provide a heteronomous attenuation and more complete active noise attenuation and the adjustable acousto-electric sensor is moved to exploit the changing physical characteristics of spatial silent zones in different noise fields.
Claims17
An improved active noise reduction system for attenuating both tonal and broadband sound in a noisy environment immediately adjacent to a user, said system comprising,
- adjustable sensing means adapted to sense ambient noise from said user environment including certain preselected sounds and being spatially adjustable in said environment,
- attenuation means adapted to attenuate said preselected sounds from the environment and thereby create a zone of silence in said immediate environment, said attenuation means adapted to attenuate both tonal and broadband sounds,
- control means adapted to cause said attenuation means to automatically adjust to attenuate whatever preselected sounds enter said environment adjacent to said user,
- wherein said sensing means is spatially adjustable so as to adapt to the changing physical characteristics of spatial zones in different noise fields which may form the environment immediately adjacent to a user.
The improved active noise reduction system as in claim I wherein said system includes a headgear means adapted to be worn by the user, said sensing means being adjustably mounted on said headgear means to provide said spatial adjustability.
In a personal noise quieting control system with a control bandwidth using a control algorithm with a transfer function requiring a constant update to estimate said function and having an actuator means having a reverberation area and an acoustic-electric transducer means movable within said reverberation area, the improvement comprising constraining the movement of said acoustic-electric means to set the transfer function of said control algorithm to eliminate the need for continual updating of the estimate of said function and providing a storage for the estimate whereby the transfer function is identified for all frequencies within the control bandwidth and is independent of the nature of the disturbance signal.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.