Numerical and experimental study on acoustic tomographic reconstruction of flow field

Abstract

This paper reports the acoustic vector tomography (AVT) method to reconstruct the airflow as a vector field. In order to increase the efficiency of reconstruction process, proposed radial basis functions approximate the flow velocity components. Tikhonov-Gaussian regularization combined with Generalized Singular Value Decomposition method and modified L-curve are introduced to solve the ill-posed problem and select the optimal regularization parameters. The feasibility and validity of the method are verified by numerical simulation and experiment. The numerical results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method with higher accuracy, better anti-noise capability and shorter consuming time compared with other reconstruction methods. Besides, a physical experiment is performed for further testing. We measured the incident flow and vortex field using the proposed acoustic method. The results show that the tendency and data of the acoustical reconstructed flow field are consistent with the strip display and anemometer results. The relative errors of most measurement points are under 15% and our proposed acoustic method is effective in practical velocity field measurement.