Reconstruction of the free-field radiation from a vibrating structure based on measurements in a noisy environment

In a noisy environment, the sound field of a source is composed of three parts, which are: The field that would be radiated by the target source into free space, the incoming field from disturbing sources or reflections, and the scattered field that is created by the incoming wave falling on the target source. To accurately identify the sound source with nearfield acoustic holography in that situation, the last two parts must be removed from the mixed field. In a previous study, a method for recovering the free sound field in a noisy environment was proposed based on the equivalent source method and measurements of pressure [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 131(2), 1260-1270 (2012)]. In the present paper, that method was modified by allowing the input data to be measurements of particle velocity instead of pressure. An experiment was carried out to examine both the pressure- and velocity-based methods, and the performance of the two methods was compared. It was found that both methods are capable of reconstructing the free-field pressure radiated by the target source based on measurements made in a noisy environment, but the velocity-based method shows a large benefit in the reconstruction of the free-field particle velocity.