Simultaneous reconstruction of temperature and velocity fields using nonlinear acoustic tomography

Abstract

Acoustic tomography developed and investigated before can only recover either the temperature or the velocity field from the time-of-flight measurements along a single direction of sonic rays. However, the sonic propagation time is a nonlinear function of temperature and velocity; thus, in principle, the measurements allow us to reconstruct both simultaneously. In order to achieve this, we propose a modality of acoustic tomography based on the recently proposed concept of nonlinear tomography, which can take full advantage of the aforementioned nonlinear dependences. Proof-of-concept numerical demonstrations are presented using representative two-dimensional temperature and flow velocity phantoms. The obtained simulative results confirmed the feasibility of nonlinear acoustic tomography in recovering the distributions of temperature and velocity fields.