A simulation-based analysis of the effect of a reflecting surface on aeroacoustic time-reversal source characterization and comparison with beamforming

Abstract

This paper presents a simulation-based analysis of the effect of a reflecting surface on aeroacoustic Time-Reversal (TR) source localization/characterization and compares the results of TR with those obtained using cross-spectral Conventional Beamforming (CB). The TR technique is shown to require the use of at least two line arrays of microphones to accurately characterize the nature of aeroacoustic sources. This work, however, shows that in the presence of a rigid surface, only one line array of microphones is sufficient to accurately localize and characterize idealized aeroacoustic sources. Forward simulations were carried out using the 2-D Linearized Euler Equations on a rectangular domain with a rigid bottom boundary (modeling a 2-D semi-infinite space) for the test-cases of stationary idealized tonal aeroacoustic (monopole, dipole and lateral quadrupole) sources located in a fully-developed mean shear flow field wherein the acoustic pressure time–history was stored at the computational boundaries. A set of TR simulations are implemented that show for each test-case that only the top line array is required to accurately characterize the idealized aeroacoustic sources in the presence of a reflecting bottom boundary, thereby suggesting the redundancy of acoustic pressure measurement at the rigid surface. The test-case of convecting (moving) idealized aeroacoustic source was also considered and the TR simulation using only the top line array in the presence of reflecting bottom boundary was able to accurately retrieve the source trajectory and simultaneously characterize its nature. This numerical experiment demonstrates in principle that when a rigid surface is mounted on the floor of an Anechoic Wind Tunnel, the use of only one (top) line array of microphones should be sufficient to characterize the nature and location of experimental flow-induced noise source. Acoustic source maps were also obtained using the CB method based on the Method of Images (to model the reflecting surface) and incorporation of the Ray-Tracing algorithm necessary to account for the effect of mean flow. The CB results were found to be highly comparable to those obtained using TR for the test-cases of non-convecting sources; thereby demonstrating the conceptual equivalence of the Method of Images and directly implementing the rigid-wall condition during TR for source localization/characterization.