Noise Directivity Reconstruction Radiated from Unmanned Underwater Vehicle’s Propeller Using the Equivalent Source Method

Noise directivity reconstruction and prediction of noise levels at long ranges from such sources as unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) or aircraft are important practical problems. The equivalent source method can be used to reconstruct and predict the sound propagation of such directional complex volume sources in the far field. However, the selection of the elementary source configurations for the equivalent source method has a certain degree of blindness. In this paper, a method for selecting elementary source configurations was proposed, considering the correlation coefficients that exhibit a strong correlation with the directivity function. It is then applied to reconstruct the noise directivity pattern radiated from a real UUV. The results demonstrate that this method can achieve higher accuracy in reconstructing complex radiated sound sources using fewer elementary source configurations. © 2025 by the authors.