Particle swarm optimization based nonlinear active noise control under saturation nonlinearity

•Saturation nonlinearity effect on the ANC performance is addressed.•PSO based nonlinear structure ANC algorithm is proposed.•Filter bank based FLANN structure is tuned with PSO.•The proposed ANC algorithm does not require secondary path estimate.•Computer simulations are carried out for performance evaluation.•Sensitivity analysis is done for PSO parameter tuning.

In this paper, a method is proposed to overcome the saturation non-linearity linked to the microphones and loudspeakers of active noise control (ANC) system. The reference microphone gets saturated when the acoustic noise at the source increases beyond the dynamic limits of the microphone. When the controller tries to drive the loudspeaker system beyond its dynamic limits, the saturation nonlinearity is also introduced into the system. The secondary path which is generally estimated with a low level auxiliary noise by a linear transfer function does not model such saturation nonlinearity. Therefore, the filtered-x least mean square (FXLMS) algorithm fails to perform when the noise level is increased. For alleviating the saturation nonlinearity effect a nonlinear functional expansion based ANC algorithm is proposed where the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is suitably applied to tune the parameters of a filter bank based functional link artificial neural network (FLANN) structure, named as PSO based nonlinear structure (PSO-NLS) algorithm. The proposed algorithm does not require any computation of secondary path estimate filtering unlike other conventional gradient based algorithms and hence has got computational advantage. The computer simulation experiments show its superior performance compared to the FXLMS, filtered-s LMS and genetic algorithms under saturation present at both at secondary and reference paths. The paper also includes a sensitivity analysis to study the effect of different parameters on ANC performance.

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