Description:

Acoustic cloaking involves surrounding a body with loudspeakers and microphones so that additional sound is created to cancel out any disturbances produced by the body: in effect the body becomes acoustically invisible, or “cloaked” (e.g. Starship Enterprise, but in terms of sound rather than light).

A cloaking system needs microphones to measure the incoming sound, signal processing to predict the correct signals to cancel unwanted scattering of sound from the body, and loudspeakers to produce that sound. In practice the signal processing is normally adaptive, to compensate for varying or unknown system properties.

You will build on a project that started in 2016 to cloak sound in 1-dimension. You will use the rig (a long duct) developed previously and develop and characterise arrays of loudspeakers and microphones. There are some numerical simulations, and experimental work. Digital signal processing is involved.

If time permits we could use the same system to actively cancel noise propagating along the duct (same system, similar physics).

Type:

Undergraduate

Outcome:

A 1-dimensional acoustic duct with a cloaking system which successfully cloaks an object. If you get 10dB reduction in the scattered noise great, 20dB would be excellent.

Prerequisites

None

Specialisations

• Mechatronics Engineering

Categories

• Acoustics
• Mechatronics

Supervisor

• Brian Mace

Team

Allocated (Not available for preferences)

Lab

Lab allocations have not been finalised