Sound field separation technique based on equivalent source method and its application in nearfield acoustic holography

A technique for separating sound fields using two closely spaced parallel measurement surfaces and based on equivalent source method is proposed. The method can separate wave components crossing two measurement surfaces. in opposite directions, which makes nearfield acoustic holography (NAH) applications in a field where there exist sources on the two sides of the hologram surface, in a reverberant field or in a scattered field, possible. The method is flexible in applications, simple in computation, and very easy to implement. The measurement surfaces can be arbitrarily shaped, and they are not restricted to be regular as in the traditional field separation technique. And, because the method performs field separation calculations directly in the spatial domain-not in the wave number domain-it avoids the errors and limitations (the window effects, etc.) associated with the traditional field separation technique based on the spatial Fourier transform method. In the paper, a theoretical description is first given, and the performance of the proposed field separation technique and its application in NAH are then evaluated through experiments. (D 2008 Acoustical Society of America.