Designing an array for performing Near-field Acoustic Holography with a small number of p-u probes

Near-field acoustic holography (NAH) enables the reconstruction of an entire three-dimensional wave field using data acquired near the sources of sound. An array of sensors can be used in combination with NAH techniques for tackling both time-stationary and transient noise problems. However, such approaches usually require that a large number of transducers is spatially distributed over the area of interest.

This paper describes some practical considerations for the design and optimization of a compact sensor array for performing NAH with a small number of sound intensity p-u probes. Two sensor geometries based on hexagonal lattice and polar sampling are assessed and compared to a regular square grid via Monte Carlo simulations accounting for multiple source configurations.

Results show that transducer placement plays an important role in the robustness and accuracy of the results, specially in terms of particle velocity reconstructions.