Sound field reconstruction within an entire cavity by plane wave expansions using a spherical microphone array.

A spherical microphone array has proved effective in reconstructing an enclosed sound field by a superposition of spherical wave functions in Fourier domain. It allows successful reconstructions surrounding the array, but the accuracy will be degraded at a distance. In order to extend the effective reconstruction to the entire cavity, a plane-wave basis in space domain is used owing to its non-decaying propagating characteristic and compared with the conventional spherical wave function method in a low frequency sound field within a cylindrical cavity. The sensitivity to measurement noise, the effects of the numbers of plane waves, and measurement positions are discussed. Simulations show that under the same measurement conditions, the plane wave function method is superior in terms of reconstruction accuracy and data processing efficiency, that is, the entire sound field imaging can be achieved by only one time calculation instead of translations of local sets of coefficients with respect to every measurement position into a global one. An experiment was conducted inside an aircraft cabin mock-up for validation. Additionally, this method provides an alternative possibility to recover the coefficients of high order spherical wave functions in a global coordinate system without coordinate translations with respect to local origins.