Noise cancelling windows for home usage coming soon

Noise is a major stress factor in the modern society, especially for the people living in a big and crowded metropolis.  But no matter if you live in the suburbs or a in a bad neighbourhood, all kind of noises can disturb you, like the quarrelsome neighbours, the way-too-sensible alarm of a car parked next to your block or the annoying sonic bang made by a plane reaching the sound barrier. All these problems could be diminished by the invention of the noise cancelling windows.

Thilo Bein is the head of a group of scientists from Darmstadt, Germany, working on developing this kind of technology for mass usage in apartments, offices and so. These windows fight noise with its own weapon: vibrations. Cause, noise propagates itself through various environments via these vibrations. If you can control the vibration of the surfaces, in this case the window, you could drastically reduce the level of the passing through bruits. Like Thilo Bein says, a regular window "acts like a loudspeaker or a membrane", amplifying the vibrations. If you could prevent this behaviour, the problem would be eliminated.

A way of reducing the loudspeaker effect of a window is thickening the glass, using several layers for a window. This method is quite inefficient and kind of expensive though. The German scientists are trying something else: they use piezoelectric patches of ceramic material, no bigger then an ordinary stamp, that are designed to produce vibrations when passed by an electric charge. All the patches are connected with wires to a computer.

You can see the patches on this noise cancelling window prototype

When the noise vibrations hit the window, the panel starts vibrating as well. The patches sense the vibrations and pass the data to the main computer. This one analyzes the data and sends back specific electrical charges to the patches, making them vibrate in a certain way, that compensates the initial vibration of the window, caused by the noise. Off course, all these happen in just fractions of a second.

Airports would benefit a lot from the noise cancelling window technology

The technology seems pretty simple, theoretical. In their lab tests, Bein’s team managed to reduce noises to around 50 % of their original intensity. However, many inconveniences will have to be outrun before a commercial version will be available. For now, the patches and the wires couldn’t be made transparent, and can be easily seen trough the glass. They hope to overcome this problem soon enough, but the production costs would be sky high unfortunately. On the other part, the processing capacity of the central unit of different kinds of sounds is limited, special software that could cover a vast marge of noise frequencies and intensities being needed, that is yet to be developed.

The Germans hope to make their technology available in a couple of years, but other scientists seems a little skeptical about that. And even if they could manage to perfect the noise canceling windows, how many of us would afford them? Offices, airports, railways stations and other important facilities situated in noisy environments would benefit from this technology a lot though, so I’m looking forward to Bein’s team work. I’ll keep you posted over the time…

Source: Ubergizmo