Reconstruction of transient acoustic radiation from a sphere.

Transient near-field acoustical holography (NAH) formulation is derived from the Helmholtz equation least squares (HELS) method to reconstruct acoustic radiation from a spherical surface subject to transient excitations in a free field. To facilitate derivations of temporal solutions, we make use of the Laplace transform and expansion in terms of the spherical Hankel functions and spherical harmonics, with their coefficients settled by solving a system of equations obtained by matching an assumed-form solution to the measured acoustic pressure. To derive a general form of solution for a temporal kernel, we replace the spherical Hankel functions and their derivatives by polynomials, recast infinite integrals in the inverse Laplace transform as contour integrals in a complex s-plane, and evaluate it via the residue theorem. The transient acoustic quantities anywhere including the source surface are then obtained by convoluting the temporal kernels with respect to the measured acoustic pressure. Numerical examples of reconstructing transient acoustic fields from explosively expanding, impulsively accelerating, and partially accelerating spheres, and that from a sphere subject to an arbitrarily time-dependent excitation are depicted. To illustrate the effectiveness of HELS-based transient NAH formulations, all input data are collected along an arbitrarily selected line segment and used to reconstruct transient acoustic quantities everywhere.