Microphone Windscreens for Turbulent Noise Suppression when Applying Active Noise Control to Ducts

Low noise level is an essential feature when installing ventilation systems nowadays. The traditional noise control approaches use passive silencers to attenuate the undesired ventilation noise. These silencers have a high attenuation over a broad frequency range. However, traditional passive silencers are ineffective at low frequencies and tend to be relatively large and bulky when they are used for low frequencies. An approach to improve the low frequency noise attenuation and to reduce the size of a low frequency silencer is active noise control (ANC). A problem when applying ANC to attenuate noise in ducts is that both the reference microphone and the error microphone are placed in an air flow. Accordingly, the microphones sense the sound propagating through the duct as well as the turbulent fluctuations generated by the wind passing over the microphones. The turbulent flow noise reduces the coherence between the reference microphone and the error microphone, resulting in reduced performance of a feedforward ANC system. For improving the performance it is important with as little corruption from turbulent flow noise as possible. The coherence can be improved by reducing the flow velocity around the microphones by using some kind of windscreen. This paper presents comparison results for microphone installations based on different windscreens for suppression of the turbulent wind noise. The presented measurements are carried out in the frequency range 0-400 Hz - the plane wave propagation region for the ducts in use - and for flow speeds up to 5,9 m/s. The results show that with appropriate screens and placement the attenuation and frequency range of attenuation can be significantly improved.