Linearisation of micro loudspeakers using adaptive control

Sammanfattning: Loudspeakers were invented over 150 years ago, but the loudspeakers used todayare still based on the same ideas. Traditionally, good sound quality has been obtainedby using expensive materials in the loudspeakers and by allowing themto be big. However, nowadays loudspeakers are wanted in applications such asmobile phones and tablets where size and weight are very limited and there is aconstant desire to decrease production costs. Special small loudspeakers, knownas micro loudspeakers, have been developed for this purpose but due to the severerestrictions in size and manufacturing costs, the sound quality in the microloudspeakers is relatively poor. One problem is that the nonlinearities of thesystem, present in any loudspeaker, become more evident in the case of microloudspeakers and cause noticeable distortion of the sound.This master’s thesis has been performed in cooperation with Opalum (formerlyActiwave), a company specializing in using digital signal processing to improvethe sound in loudspeakers with poor acoustic properties. The objective of thethesis is to investigate ways to increase the sound quality in micro loudspeakersby using nonlinear control. Focus has been on frequencies below the resonancefrequency since the distortion is more noticeable at low frequencies. First, a nonlinearmodel of the micro loudspeaker has been obtained using system identificationstrategies. The model describes the relationship between the voltage overthe voice-coil and the diaphragm displacement. Subsequently, input-output linearisationhas been used to design a controller for the system and the effect onthe distortion has been investigated through experiments. Two different modelstructures have been tested, a physical model based on the Thiele-Small modeland a black-box model with a Hammerstein-Wiener structure. In both cases, thenonlinearities were modelled as polynomials. The controller was then extendedwith an updating algorithm, making it adaptive.The efficiency of the controllers has been proved by experiments, where distortionwas decreased by up to 60 % compared to the case without control. The effectwas largest for low frequencies, around one third of the resonance frequency,but improvements were noted up to about two thirds of the resonance frequency,depending on the loudspeaker unit. The approach using a physical model andthat using a black-box model have shown similar results.