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.
The conventional nearfield acoustic holography(NAH) is usually based on the assumption of free-field conditions, and it also requires that the measurement aperture should be larger than the actual source. This paper is to focus on the problem that neither of the above-mentioned requirements can be met, and to examine the feasibility of reconstructing the sound field radiated by partial source, based on double-layer pressure measurements made in a non-free field by using patch NAH combined with sound field separation technique. And also, the sensitivity of the reconstructed result to the measurement error is analyzed in detail. Two experiments involving two speakers in an exterior space and one speaker inside a car cabin are presented. The experimental results demonstrate that the patch NAH based on single-layer pressure measurement cannot obtain a satisfied result due to the influences of disturbing sources and reflections, while the patch NAH based on double-layer pressure measurements can successfully remove these influences and reconstruct the patch sound field effectively.
