Characterization of acoustic material at oblique incidence using a spherical microphone array

This paper proposes two distinct methods for estimating the surface impedance Z_s of acoustic materials using a spherical microphone array. The first method is based on the spherical ambisonic representation of sound fields to estimate the normal particle velocity and the sound pressure at the surface of the material. The second method uses an optimization process, where the measured sound pressure field is constrained to match a theoretical model. These two methods are compared to two existing methods: the equivalent source approach and the two-microphone measurement technique. The results show a clear advantage of the microphone array methods compared to the classical two-microphone method. The measurements show an accurate reconstruction of surface impedance and absorption coefficient between 120 and 5000 Hz for various sound incidences but also show edge effect perturbations due to the limited size of the tested samples. In addition, two criteria are proposed, one estimating the noise floor level allowing the optimization of the measurement results, the other evaluating the area of accurate impedance reconstruction on the surface of the material.