Wideband RELAX and wideband CLEAN for aeroacoustic imaging

Microphone arrays can be used for acoustic source localization and characterization in wind tunnel testing. In this paper, the wideband RELAX (WB-RELAX) and the wideband CLEAN (WB-CLEAN) algorithms are presented for aeroacoustic imaging using an acoustic array. WB-RELAX is a parametric approach that can be used efficiently for point source imaging without the sidelobe problems suffered by the delay-and-sum beamforming approaches. WB-CLEAN does not have sidelobe problems either, but it behaves more like a nonparametric approach and can be used for both point source and distributed source imaging. Moreover, neither of the algorithms suffers from the severe performance degradations encountered by the adaptive beamforming methods when the number of snapshots is small and/or the sources are highly correlated or coherent with each other. A two-step optimization procedure is used to implement the WB-RELAX and WB-CLEAN algorithms efficiently. The performance of WB-RELAX and WB-CLEAN is demonstrated by applying them to measured data obtained at the NASA Langley Quiet Flow Facility using a small aperture directional array (SADA). Somewhat surprisingly, using these approaches, not only were the parameters of the dominant source accurately determined, but a highly correlated multipath of the dominant source was also discovered.