Feedforward control of sound transmission using an active acoustic metamaterial

Metamaterials have received significant interest in recent years due to their potential ability to exhibit behaviour not found in naturally occurring materials. This includes the generation of band gaps, which are frequency regions with high levels of wave attenuation. In the context of acoustics, these band gaps can be tuned to occur at low frequencies where the acoustic wavelength is large compared to the material, and where the performance of traditional passive noise control treatments is limited. Therefore, such acoustic metamaterials have been shown to offer a significant performance advantage compared to traditional passive control treatments, however, due to their resonant behaviour, the band gaps tend to occur over a relatively narrow frequency range. A similar long wavelength performance advantage can be achieved using active noise control, but the systems in this case do not rely on resonant behaviour. This paper demonstrates how the performance of an acoustic metamaterial, consisting of an array of Helmholtz resonators, can be significantly enhanced by the integration of an active control mechanism that is facilitated by embedding loudspeakers into the resonators. Crucially, it is then also shown how the active acoustic metamaterial significantly outperforms an equivalent traditional active noise control system. In both cases a broadband feedforward control strategy is employed to minimise the transmitted pressure in a one-dimensional acoustic control problem and a new method of weighting the control effort over a targeted frequency range is described.