Reconstructing the normal velocities of acoustic sources in noisy environments using a rigid microphone array

An acoustic source identification technique with single layer pressure measurement is presented to reconstruct normal velocities of target sources in noisy environments. The theory for this reconstruction is developed from the inverse patch transfer functions method which is supposed to combine measurements of pressure and velocity on a surface surrounding the source. The rigid microphone array is called an acoustic mask, which is designed to obtain pressure on the Neumann boundary condition and realized by microphones flush mounted on the aluminum plate. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated by giving the normal velocities of two baffled loudspeakers in a noisy environment in the simulation and experiment. Another experiment of a clamped steel plate is further presented to illustrate the ability of the acoustic mask to obtain the partial velocity field of interest without reconstruction of the whole source surface velocity. The accuracy of this technique is demonstrated by comparison with the accelerometer method. (C) 2016 Acoustical Society of America.