A Complementary Effect in Active Control of Powertrain and Road Noise in the Vehicle Interior

This study shows that a concurrent active noise control strategy for engine harmonics and road noise has a complementary effect. In particular, we found that engine booming noise is additionally attenuated when road noise control is concurrently used with engine harmonics control; an additional attenuation of 2.08 dB and 1.25 dB for the C1.5 and C2.0 orders, respectively, was achieved. A parallel multichannel feedforward controller for non-stationary narrowband engine harmonics and broadband road noise was designed and implemented to reduce noise in all four seats. Two control signals were considered independent because the reference signals, engine revolution speed for the engine harmonic controller, and acceleration signal for the road noise controller are uncorrelated. However, if the reference sensor for the road noise controller is installed along the overlapping transfer path between the engine noise and road noise, the engine noise may also be suppressed by the control signal for the road noise attenuation. Based on transfer path analyses for both engine harmonics and road noise, the optimal positions for the reference sensors were selected. In addition, we identified several overlapping transfer paths between the engine booming noise and road noise. A practical active noise control system combined with a remote microphone technique was implemented for a large six-cylinder sedan using a vehicle audio system to evaluate the noise attenuation performance. The experiments showed that the interior noise from the engine and road excitation was effectively suppressed by the proposed concurrent control strategy.