There are many industrial environments which are exposed to a high-level noise. It is necessary to protect people from the noise. Most of the time, the consumer requires a miniature version of a noise canceller to satisfy the internal working place requirements. Very important thing is to select the most appropriate personal hearing protection device, for example an earplug. It should guarantee high passive noise attenuation and allow for secondary sound generation in case of active control. In many cases the noise is nonstationary. For instance, some of the noisy devices are switched on and off, speed of some rotors or fans changes, etc. To avoid any severe transient acoustic effects due to potential convergence problems of adaptive systems, a fixed-parameter approach to control is appreciated. If the noise were stationary, it would be possible to design an optimal control filter minimising variance of the signal being the effect of the acoustic noise and the secondary sound interference. Because of noise nonstationarity for most applications, the idea of generalised disturbance defined by a frequency window of different types has been developed by the authors and announced in previous publications. The aim of this paper is to apply such an approach to different earplugs and verify its noise reduction properties. Simulation experiments are conducted based on real world measurements performed using the G. R. A. S. artificial head equipped with an artificial mechanical ear, and the noise recorded in a power plant.

Vibrating plates have been recently used for a number of active noise control applications. They are resistant to difficult environmental conditions including dust, humidity, and even precipitation. However, their properties significantly depend on temperature. The plate temperature changes, caused by ambient temperature changes or plate heating due to internal friction, result in varying response of the plate, and may make it significantly different than response of a fixed model. Such mismatch may deteriorate performance of an active noise control system or even lead to divergence of a model-based adaptation algorithm.

In this paper effects of vibrating plate temperature variation on a feedforward adaptive active noise reduction system with the multichannel Filtered-reference LMS algorithm are examined. For that purpose, a thin aluminum plate is excited with multiple Macro-Fiber Composite actuators. The plate temperature is forced by a set of Peltier cells, what allows for both cooling and heating the plate. The noise is generated at one side of the plate, and a major part of it is transmitted through the plate. The goal of the control system is to reduce sound pressure level at a specified area on the other side of the plate.

To guarantee successful operation of the control system in face of plate temperature variation, a gain-scheduling scheme is proposed to support the Filtered-reference LMS algorithm.