To remove the scattering effect of the disturbing sound on the target source when implementing nearfield acoustic holography in a non-free field, a free field recovery technique based on the spherical wave superposition method is proposed. In the method, the sound field separation technique based on the spherical wave superposition method is first used to separate the incoming and outgoing fields, and a further step for separating the radiated and scattered fields is performed by utilizing the surface admittance of the target source as the boundary condition. The technique makes it possible to correctly identify noise sources in a non-free sound field. The basic principle of the technique is described firstly, a method for choosing the optimal number of spherical wave expansion terms is given, and two numerical simulations are used to demonstrate the validity of this technique. It is shown that, for the lower frequency, the scattering effect can be neglected, and the radiated field of the target source can be obtained by the sound field separation technique, however, as the increasing of the frequency, the scattering effect cannot be neglected, and the free field recovery technique has to be used to obtain the radiated field of the target source.
