Noise Source Identification in a Cab Interior

Nearfield Acoustical Holography (NAH) has traditionally been utilized in the identification of noise sources on separable geometry of the wave equation. Recent advances have utilized the Boundary Element Method (BEM) to extend the source identification to noise sources with arbitrary geometry. However, this generalized NAH leads to the solution of a discrete ill-posed problem that requires solution through Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in conjunction with numerical regularization. Robust numerical regularization schemes have recently been implemented in commercial software COMET/Acoustics® [1, 2] so as to fully automate the noise source identification procedure, and render it applicable to complex, practical problems. An application involving noise source identification on the interior of an earthmoving equipment cab is presented to demonstrate the capability of generalized NAH. The NAH reconstructed velocities on the surface of the cab are compared with the input velocities. The effects of having absorptive panels in the model or incorporating noise in the input pressure to NAH, on the predicted velocity distribution are also investigated.