Near field acoustic holography based on the equivalent source method and pressure-velocity transducers

The advantage of using the normal component of the particle velocity rather than the sound pressure in the hologram plane as the input of conventional spatial Fourier transform based near field acoustic holography (NAH) and also as the input of the statistically optimized variant of NAH has recently been demonstrated. This paper examines whether there might be a similar advantage in using the particle velocity as the input of NAH based on the equivalent source method (ESM). Error sensitivity considerations indicate that ESM-based NAH is less sensitive to measurement errors when it is based on particle velocity input data than when it is based on measurements of sound pressure data, and this is confirmed by a simulation study and by experimental results. A method that combines pressure- and particle velocity-based reconstructions in order to distinguish between contributions to the sound field generated by sources on the two sides of the hologram plane is also examined.