The sophisticated yet simple system is composed of a computerized control unit and cylindrical absorbers made of adaptive damping rubber. The absorbers tune themselves to disturbance tones using a continuous feedback loop. The absorbers may be installed in the plane's interior or exterior, depending on the type of aircraft. The novel approach employs structural control rather than acoustic or structural-acoustic control. ATMA reduces the interior noise in the rear of a DC-9 aircraft by 90 percent.
Passengers can now enjoy a pleasant flight without having to shout to talk to the flight attendant.
The system, which claims the world's highest performance for volumetric visualization applications, is based on Aspex's fully proprietary Associative String Processor and Modular Massively Parallel Computing technologies. The Naval Research Lab will use the system to study computational fluid dynamics used in developing underwater systems and other complex, three-dimensional visualizations. The Office of Naval Research pursues an integrated science and technology program from basic research through manufacturing technologies.