Sound field separating on arbitrary surfaces enclosing a sound scatterer based on combined integral equations

To eliminate the limitations of the conventional sound field separation methods which are only applicable to regular surfaces, a sound field separation method based on combined integral equations is proposed to separate sound fields directly in the spatial domain. In virtue of the Helmholtz integral equations for the incident and scattering fields outside a sound scatterer, combined integral equations are derived for sound field separation, which build the quantitative relationship between the sound fields on two arbitrary separation surfaces enclosing the sound scatterer. Through boundary element discretization of the two surfaces, corresponding systems of linear equations are obtained for practical application. Numerical simulations are performed for sound field separation on different shaped surfaces. The influences induced by the aspect ratio of the separation surfaces and the signal noise in the measurement data are also investigated. The separated incident and scattering sound fields agree well with the original corresponding fields described by analytical expressions, which validates the effectiveness and accuracy of the combined integral equations based separation method.