A note on finite difference estimation of acoustic particle velocity

The influence of instrumentation amplitude and phase mismatch on finite difference measurement of mean square particle velocity is examined. It is shown theoretically and demonstrated experimentally that the resulting error depends on two properties of the sound field, the ratio of the active intensity to the mean square particle velocity and the ratio of the reactive intensity to the mean square particle velocity.

Very large errors can occur near particle velocity nodes in interference fields even with well-matched state-of-the-art sound intensity measurement systems. However, outside of such regions, moderate phase mismatch has very little influence on the performance of the measurement system. Amplitude mismatch is somewhat more problematic.