Session Spotlight: Acoustic Analysis in Industry

[Dave Brown]

Presenters: Jeff Schmitt of ViAcoustics and Nico Zurmuhlen of CAE Engineering and Services

With more and more new war veterans coming home with hearing loss due to explosions and other loud noises, a lot of interest has come to the field of hearing protection. Those involved in aerospace also realize the need for more effective hearing protection systems.

Jeff Schmitt, an expert in noise and acoustic analysis, works with the military as well as NASA EARLab at NASA's Glenn Research Center to help them develop hearing protection systems for astronauts. He evaluates hearing protector systems and assigns a rating for the protector's effectiveness. In order to achieve the greatest accuracy in rating protection systems, Jeff and his colleagues have created a sophisticated system to precisely control and monitor acoustics. As the core of their system, they use multiple NI PXI modular instruments in combination with various high-power amplifiers, speakers, advanced microphones, signal processors and other instruments. They also used NI LabVIEW to develop custom software to monitor, analyze and control the NASA application.

In addition to hearing protection for military and aerospace, industry in general also is paying attention to new developments in acoustic science. Nico Zurmuhlen's company offers engineering services, from concept to deployment, for most industries. With the help of NI, his company developed a noise inspector with a system architecture based on LabVIEW for high-channel-count analysis for all types of sound and noise monitoring. They created a unique acoustic camera to acquire and analyze acoustic signals via a microphone array, and used LabVIEW to create a variety of beamforming algorithms. Because of the advanced performance of the LabVIEW algorithms, their camera can create up to 10 acoustic pictures per second. This technology is being used for numerous purposes, wherever engineers require extremely accurate, high-performance sound characterization.

Both of these applications illustrate the flexibility of NI hardware and software to meet a wide variety of applications. This was an interesting session that highlighted once again how NI customers are advancing technology that is improvng the world.