Identification of Incoherent Noise Sources

A Nearfield Acoustical Holography (NAH) technique that is applicable to the identification of multiple, incoherent noise sources from measured sound pressure fields are described. Initially, a partial coherence approach is adopted to decouple an incoherent acoustic field into a set of fully coherent, mutually incoherent partial fields. Subsequently, NAH is applied individually to each coherent partial field to reconstruct the corresponding source field. A boundary element based NAH reconstruction procedure is utilized so that the technique is valid for arbitrary source geometry. The process is validated by identifying the sources in a two-speaker system that was driven by independent signal generators.