Conference & Magazine Papers

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The paper describes a commercially available fly-over beamforming system based on methodologies already published, but using an array that was designed for quick and precise deployment on a concrete runway rather than for minimum sidelobe level. Time domain tracking Delay And Sum (DAS) beamforming is the first processing step, followed by Deconvolution in the frequency domain to reduce sidelobes, enhance resolution, and get absolute scaling of the source maps. The system has been used for a series of fly-over measurements on a Business Jet type MU300 from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Results from a couple of these measurements are presented: Contribution spectra from selected areas on the aircraft to the sound pressure level at the array are compared against the total sound pressure spectrum measured by the array. One major aim of the paper is to verify that the system performs well although the array was designed with quick deployment as a main criterion. The results are very encouraging. A second aim is to elaborate on the handling of the array shading function in connection with the calculation of the Point Spread Function (PSF) used in deconvolution. Recent publications have used a simple formula to compensate for Doppler effects for the case of flat broadband spectra. A more correct formula is derived in the present paper, covering also a Doppler correction to be made in the shading function, when that function is used in the PSF calculation.

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The number of noise source identification (NSI) techniques available to engineers working on noise, vibration and harshness problems has increased considerably in recent years. The choice of the most appropriate technique depends upon the application and the information required. This paper reviews techniques for noise source identification and quantification ranging from simple hand-held sound intensity systems, hand-held array systems to large ground based microphone arrays. The methods include Beamforming, Spherical Beamforming and Acoustic Holography. Guidelines are given to help the engineer choose a suitable technique based on the frequency range of interest, the distance from the measurement array to the test object and the resolution required. Practical application examples ranging from hearing aids to wind turbines are presented to illustrate the various NSI techniques.

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Noise from large construction projects can be a nuisance for nearby communities. Vibration from activities like pile driving, concrete crushing and tunneling can also create nuisance but may also risk structural damage. Increasingly, both noise and vibration are significant factors surrounding a construction project. If not managed properly they can lead to project delays, further prolonging the nuisance and significantly increasing project cost. To help mitigate these risks, contractors are now using continuous noise and vibration monitoring to ensure that the impact from construction activity is kept within guidelines.

This paper looks at how continuous real time monitoring of noise and vibration can be used to help manage community impact and reduce the risk of structural damage. It will look at legislation and best practice both in Canada and in other parts of the world. Presenting the concept of environmental capacity it also shows how engaging communities, setting expectations and building trust can be effective way of mitigating impact.

The paper goes on to highlight new technology that is in use in Canadian construction sites which uses the approaches discussed above to help manage compliance and reduce risk.

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Since its first mention in 1999, Integrated Environment Noise Management has promised new possibilities for managing environment noise through the interaction between measurements and calculations. This has lead to the technique of Dynamic Noise Mapping, where measurements are used to update calculated noise maps, which was primarily intended to improve local noise maps and supplement noise monitoring results. However, with the ever-increasing availability of internet communication and the rise of managed services which enable the efficient exploitation of new technology, integrating measurements and calculations for more pro-active environment noise management, where noise issues can be avoided, is becoming potentially interesting and possible. So, the link between calculation software and real-time noise monitoring solutions enables the automated creation of noise maps based on real-life noise and weather monitoring, giving feedback to enable a more optimal planning of operations within the noise limits. This dynamic mapping can be done with updates as regularly as every hour enabling industry to schedule operational activity, quickly assess the noise impact and ensure that they are doing the utmost whilst complying with noise limits. This paper describes how Dynamic Noise Mapping for Pro-Active Environment Noise Management works and its possibilities, challenges and limitations based on current knowledge and technology. The paper will also identify areas of future research.

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The construction of infrastructure and new buildings risks causing significant impact on the neighbourhood, particularly for major infrastructure projects. Due to local community concerns, construction activities are often subject to operational restrictions. To effectively operate within these restrictions, instrumentation is often deployed to monitor noise and / or vibration. An alternative approach to the purchasing and operating costly equipment to monitor compliance is available through Managed Services offering technology innovation enabling simultaneous noise and vibration monitoring and manpower and cost reductions in monitoring resulting in a more economically attractive approach to traditional noise monitoring.

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Long term monitoring of noise from airports, industrial facilities and construction projects has been well established over many years. The systems monitor noise levels at various points around the facility, feed the data back to a central system where data can be summarized and any breaches in compliance criteria are reported. These systems are passive by nature; they simply report what happened giving little opportunity to do anything to prevent breaches in the first place. Should breaches occur, attendance at the site is typically necessary to investigate before advice on mitigation can be given to prevent future breaches of compliance.

Technology advances in how data is captured, what data is captured and how it is accessed now means that in a large number of cases investigation can be achieved remotely without the need for site visits. This makes the process more efficient, lower cost, and much more immediate. Technology can now deliver results in real time that can help to prevent breaches occurring in the first place.

This paper outlines the technology advances and suggests how they will help to change the way noise consultants can deliver more monitoring services over a wider geographical area with fewer staff whilst simultaneously providing a better quality result.

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The two microphone acoustic impedance tube is used to measure the acoustic impedance and absorption coefficient properties for absorptive materials. A commonly followed test method for this is described by the standard ASTM E1050. This test standard is popular compared to alternative test methods due to its repeatability, speed of test and small sample size requirements. The two microphone broadband noise source based test method was introduced in 1985 and was an update to the single microphone sinusoidal excitation method given by ASTM C384. The ASTM E1050 standard was updated in 1998 to include changes in the required physical dimensions of the tube. Specifically, the tube length was said to be increased to be sufficiently long to meet the requirement that plane waves be fully developed before reaching the microphones and test specimen. Further, a minimum of three tube diameters was specified between the sound source and the nearest microphone to allow for sufficient distance for the subsiding of any non-plane waves propagating within the tube. Using two different tube lengths meeting the requirements of the two versions of the standard, this study investigated experimentally whether any differences resulted in the measured normal incidence absorption for multiple test samples as a result of the prescribed dimensional changes. The precision of the measured results are compared using the repeatability and reproducibility requirements defined in Table 2 of the E1050 standard.

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Two mounts were added to a helicopter making it possible to carry different payloads. To validate the structural effects of these modifications, modal tests were performed on-ground on the helicopter in its standard configuration as well as in its modified configuration with the added payloads. In addition, an in-flight test was performed to verify the impact on the existing flight envelope. For all tests, Operational Modal Analysis was used. The obtained results allowed for updating the flight procedures and operating profiles for the helicopter and provided added flexibility with respect to the best possible helicopter configuration to obtain the mission objectives, while maintaining optimum safety for the flight crew.

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In this work, the noise sources on three types of construction equipment are imaged with a beamforming array, while simultaneously the radiated sound powers are determined by a sixmicrophone hemisphere per ISO 6393 or ISO 6395. Of particular interest are: noise induced by turbulent flow at the exit of an exhaust stack, the effect of a noise reduction package in the engine compartment, and crawler track noise during motion. The absolute levels of the mapped source regions are compared with the total radiated sound power.

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Over the last 10 years, the use of Sound Quality (SQ) has become an accepted automotive industry standard.

This “newer” field of acoustics has proven to be quite useful in many areas, such as; new product design, quantifying subjective opinions on products with objective metrics, troubleshooting current models, and acoustic modeling of products. This paper will cover the basics in sound quality and apply some of these fundamental concepts in a few examples of the use of sound quality in a practical engineering environment.

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A new ASTM standard has been adopted for characterizing acoustical materials in a tube. This new standard is ASTM E2611-09, Measurement of Normal Incidence Sound Transmission of Materials Based on the Transfer Matrix Method. This test method describes the use of a tube, four microphones, and a digital frequency analysis system for the measurement of normal incidence transmission loss and other important acoustical properties of materials by determination of the sample’s acoustic transfer matrix.

In this paper the two and four microphone methods for calculating the reflection coefficient and the related normal incidence sound absorption coefficient will be compared with each other and with the results predicted using finite element software.

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In a former paper (“Second Order Blind Identification (SOBI) and its relation to Stochastic Subspace Identification (SSI) algorithm”, 28th IMAC, 2010), the authors established the link between the popular SSI algorithm used in output-only modal analysis and the Second Order Blind Identification (SOBI) algorithm developed for blind source separation in the field of signal processing. It was concluded that the two algorithms, although seemingly very different, are actually jointly diagonalizing the same covariance matrix over a range of time-lags. This is explicit in SOBI and implicit in SSI. One main difference, however, is that SOBI focuses on estimating the (real) modal matrix as a joint diagonalizer, but without taking advantage of the specific structure of the covariance matrix formed by the Markov coefficients and by incorrectly assuming no-damping or very low damping. On the other hand, SSI specifically exploits the covariance matrix structure so as to estimate complex modes, but puts less emphasis on the “joint diagonalizing” property of the modal matrix. The aim of this communication is to introduce a new algorithm based on Alternating Least Squares (ALS) approach that combines advantages of both SOBI and SSI in order to return improved estimates of modal parameters. It is shown in this work that this algorithm is capable of identifying complex modes, closely spaced modes and heavily damped and can also be expanded to deal with the cases where there are less number of sensors available than the number modes to be estimated. The suggested approach therefore is a step towards expanding the applicability of BSS based approaches to Operational Modal Analysis applications.

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The authors previously presented an extension of operational modal analysis to linear time periodic systems. This paper builds on that work, revealing how more advanced operational modal analysis methods can be extended to linear time-periodic systems.
These extensions are found to provide more accurate estimates of the damping of the modes of the time-periodic systems, and to provide good estimates of the mode shapes of the systems so long as the measurements stand out clearly above the noise. Application of the complex mode indicator function an the EMIF algorithm makes it possible to separate the forward and backward whirling modes of a wind turbine, which is difficult since each of these modes is manifest at several harmonics due to the anisotropy in the tower supporting the turbine.

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Work presented in the current paper in an extension of the pervious work and describes the details of the measurement campaign aimed at identifying modal parameters of ALSTOM’s ECO 100 wind turbine. Since measuring on an operational wind turbine is a challenging job in itself, the paper also describes measurement planning and execution phases. The paper illustrates various key aspects related to practical measurements on an actual wind turbine and underlines the importance of proper planning and experiment design. The importance of a priori nowledge provided by finite element model based simulations is also underlined.

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The influence of different sound fields on the measurement error is discussed in some detail with practical examples and it is shown how a worst-case error exceeding 10 dB @ 20 kHz is a real risk. After a brief discussion of a condenser microphone which drastically reduces the error caused by influence of an unknown sound field or varying angle of incidence. Finally, test results from production samples of the new microphone are shown.

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Aerodynamic noise is particularly important for passenger car driving comfort and high speed train community comfort. This paper describes the application of acoustic array systems in wind tunnels to minimise this noise exposure.

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The study demonstrates the method using simulated vibrational responses of operational 3MW wind turbine. The responses of the tower and blades were obtained from the simulation of operational wind turbine dynamics under realistic wind load using commercial aeroelastic code.

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The study suggests a novel approach which is intended to solve a known TMM weakness due to noncausality of transmissibility functions. The study compares the results obtained using the new approach with two other implementations found in the literature.

The paper is organized as follows: the first section explains the application of the transmissibility matrix method to TPA; next section compares different interpretations of the indicator signals. Section 3 introduces a simple mechanical system and discusses results obtained by different implementations of TMM.

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Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) is one of the branches of experimental modal analysis which allows extracting modal parameters based on measuring only the responses of a structure under ambient or operational excitation which is not needed to be measured. 

The present study shows that the aeroelastic phenomena due to rotor rotation dramatically changes the character of aerodynamic excitation and sets limitations on the applicability of OMA to operational wind turbines. The main purpose of the study is to warn the experimentalists about these limitations and discuss possible ways of dealing with them.

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The paper gives a brief introduction into the theory of ONPA and highlights the main assumptions the method is based on. Focusing on structure borne noise paths, the study demonstrates that, interpreting the measured signals in special way, the true noise contributions can be obtained. Then the approach is being extended to systems with rotational DOFs and demonstrated on a simple mechanical system.

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The current study continues investigation of the method accuracy and applicability for structure borne cases. The method is applied to simulated data, which makes the validation against exact results possible. A way to improve method accuracy is suggested. The results of the improved method are compared with traditional methods results.

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Traditionally, the design of control algorithms for wind turbines is performed based on (linearized) models of the wind turbine dynamics. Control performance is strongly dependent on the accuracy of these models and for this reason validation of the dynamics is essential for achieving optimal control. The aim of this work is to identify, at different wind speeds, the dynamic model of a wind turbine in operation by means of two different system identification techniques. This work has been partly performed within the SenternNovem long-term research project "SusCon: a new approach to control wind turbines" (EOSLT02013) and partly within the InVent project-ACC1Ó (CIDEM | COPCA).

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The goal of this paper is to address these issues in order to make OMA more applicable and suitable for wind turbines. The paper first shows the application of OMA to a parked turbine and then subsequently shows its application to operational wind turbine. It is demonstrated how incorporating techniques like Coleman transformation and proper test planning, OMA can act as a viable tool for characterizing the dynamics of an operational wind turbine.

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Time Selective Response, TSR, is a frequency response measurement method based on linearly swept sine signals.

This paper briefly recollects the method and presents some experience with and guidelines for choosing measurement and weighting parameters and considerations on the associated uncertainty on the results. The results are discussed on the basis of practical measurements at Brüel & Kjær of microphone and sound level meter free field responses.

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Practically all reference microphone calibrations that are performed by national metrology institutes are pressure response calibrations. This is the case even if most practical measurements are carried out under free- or diffuse-field conditions.

This paper describes the technical aspects of the elaborate system, which has developed by the Danish Technical University (DTU) and is now offered by Brüel & Kjær with software and technical support from the university staff.

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This paper describes the new LAN-XI concept combining several different technologies.

With the introduction of the LAN-XI concept, a hitherto unseen combination of requirements can be fulfilled in the same data acquisition system thereby significantly increasing the versatility of the system and at the same time reducing the amount of measurement equipment and accessories needed.

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This paper concems OMA on large 2-poJe rotating machinery. The analysis has been limited to the frequency range around 50 and 100 Hz. where unbalance and electromagnetic forces, respectively, can give high vibration amplimdes of the stator.

Two methods have been used for the analysis: Curve-fitted Frequency Domain Decomposition (CFDD) and Stochastic Subspace Identification (SSI). The methods are evaluated and the results are compared with results from a Classical Modal Analysis performed on the same machinery.

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This paper describes the new LAN-XI concept combining several different technologies in-cluding Precision Time Protocol (PTP), Power over Ethernet (PoE), Dyn-X, REq-X and TEDS. With the introduction of the LAN-XI concept, a hitherto unseen combination of requirements can be fulfilled in the same data acquisition system thereby significantly increasing the versatil-ity of the system and at the same time reducing the amount of measurement equipment and ac-cessories needed.

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This paper continues the evaluation of the feasibility of using a four-post road simulator to replicate operating conditions and perform response-only modal analysis on a truck frame.

Work presented in this paper is continuation of a previous study that investigated the use of OMA methods for the same structure. Results obtained from the various tests are compared and validated with those from conventional EMA impact tests.

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This paper explores the possibility of applying techniques (OMA and BSS/ICA) to wind turbines, and focuses in understanding only the aeroelastic effects, thus avoiding effect of rotational loads (and hence presence of harmonic components in excitation force).

It is shown that these techniques work satisfactorily on parked turbine data, paving way to conduct further studies on more complex case of operational wind turbine.

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In this paper two clustering based approaches are suggested for the purpose of automatic mode selection.
These methods build upon the existing Stabilization Diagram tool; differing in the manner in which the stabilization diagram is constructed and clusters are being formed. Both approaches utilize a Euclidian distance based approach to automatically select the best estimate.

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The current study continues investigation of the method based on the transmissibility matrix. 
It compares the results of air-borne contribution analysis obtained by the Transmissibility method with ones from the classical source substitution method; the experiments are conducted on a vehicle equipped with an Engine Noise Simulator.

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In this paper several approaches and techniques have been used in order to extract the structural modes.
 
A preliminary random hammer testing was applied in order to get some idea of the natural frequencies of the gearbox housing itself. In time domain the Stochastic Subspace Identification, SSI has been applied. In the calculations of the stabilization diagram based on SSI it is possible to set up user tolerances to identify unrealistic low damping, thus being able to separate harmonic components from the structural modes.

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Durch Verwendung der TEDS-, Dyn-X- und REq-XTechnologie können Messaufgaben in der Schall- und Schwingungsmesstechnik schneller, komfortabler und sicherer ausgeführt werden. Mit der Dyn-X Technologie können Fehler wie Übersteuerungen oder die Wahl des falschen Messbereichs vermieden werden; es wird immer im richtigen Messbereich gemessen. Durch die REq-X Technologie werden die Verwendungsmöglichkeiten bereits vorhandener Sensoren erweitert, die Messgenauigkeit erhöht und der nutzbare Frequenzbereich der Sensoren ausgedehnt.

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The present paper is based on work done in the European project CREDO, which deals with noise in aircraft and helicopter cabins.
The focus is therefore on radiated and absorbed intensity components on cabin panels.

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Brüel & Kjær has implemented the methodology of ISO 1996-2 in relation to assessing the audibility of prominent discrete tones in environmental noise into its innovative 2250 and 2270 hand-held analysers.

This paper describes the implementation in hand-held instrumentation.

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This paper presents a comparison of three PClVIs: GCV, L-C, and Normalized Cumulative Periodogram (NCP). The methods are used in connection with three NAH methods. All combinations of PClVIs and NAH methods are investigated using simulations with different types of noise, and comparisons are also carried out for a practical experiment.

The aim of this work is to create a better understanding of which mechanisms affect the performance of the different PClVIs.

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The present paper compares the performance of the methods for a number of experimental test cases for acoustic sourse identification in complex environments, and studies the influence on the performance of the models when changing selected parameters.

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The present paper is based on work done in the European project CREDO, which deals with noise in aircraft and helicopter cabins. The focus is therefore on radiated and absorbed intensity components on cabin panels.

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Binaural synthesis using SHB may be a useful tool to reproduce a 3D sound field binaurally while saving considerably on measurement time because head rotation can be simulated based on a single recording.

The current study reports on an experiment to investigate the validity of using sphericalharmonics beamforming (SHB) when auralizing a 3D field.