Reconstruction of vibroacoustic responses of a highly nonspherical structure using Helmholtz equation least-squares method.

The vibroacoustic responses of a highly nonspherical vibrating object are reconstructed using Helmholtz equation least-squares (HELS) method. The objectives of this study are to examine the accuracy of reconstruction and the impacts of various parameters involved in reconstruction using HELS. The test object is a simply supported and baffled thin plate. The reason for selecting this object is that it represents a class of structures that cannot be exactly described by the spherical Hankel functions and spherical harmonics, which are taken as the basis functions in the HELS formulation, yet the analytic solutions to vibroacoustic responses of a baffled plate are readily available so the accuracy of reconstruction can be checked accurately. The input field acoustic pressures for reconstruction are generated by the Rayleigh integral. The reconstructed normal surface velocities are validated against the benchmark values, and the out-of-plane vibration patterns at several natural frequencies are compared with the natural modes of a simply supported plate. The impacts of various parameters such as number of measurement points, measurement distance, location of the origin of the coordinate system, microphone spacing, and ratio of measurement aperture size to the area of source surface of reconstruction on the resultant accuracy of reconstruction are examined.