Implementation of an Active Vibration Control System on a Cogeneration Plant

Active noise control (ANC) aims to reduce a noise source at a listening point by destructive interference with a reverse phase noise emitted by one or more control devices. ANC systems cover a wide range of applications, such as industrial plants, vehicle cabins, headphones. Usually, in these applications the control devices are loudspeakers, and the error signals come from microphones. In outdoor applications, this solution comes with some limitations, such as the ageing of the loudspeakers due to humidity, temperature, rain and dust, and the presence of wired connections between the error sensors and the control system. This paper presents a noise reduction solution for a cogeneration plant, consisting of an Active Vibration Control (AVC) system applied to the cogenerator enclosure. To overcome the above limitations, electrodynamic shakers are used as controllers and an accelerometer as error signal. The control algorithm is a single reference, Single Input, Multiple Output (SIMO) Filtered-X Normalized Least Mean Square (FxNLMS), implemented in a Virtual Studio Technology (VST) plugin. VST plugins work in real-time in Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software installed on personal computers, therefore without the need for low-level implementation on dedicated electronic boards, thus reducing the development time and the cost of the equipment. First, the effectiveness of the solution is demonstrated in a laboratory experiment. Subsequently, the results obtained on the cogenerator are presented, which show remarkable performance, with a noise reduction up to −17.5 dB on the main disturbing frequencies.