A comparison of sound field reconstructions using a spherical wave model and a plane wave model

Reconstructions of the interior sound field inside an aircraft cabin are crucial to noise reduction based on the active noise control (ANC) technology. This paper presents a comparison of the sound field reconstructions inside an aircraft cabin mock-up using both a spherical wave model (SWM) and a plane wave model (PWM) by experiments. A transparent spherical microphone array (SMA) is first employed to measure the sound fields over different positions. Both a spherical harmonics decomposition (SHD) and a plane wave decomposition (PWD) are then done by solving a system of linear equations through a 1-norm minimization procedure. Finally, the sound pressures over a horizontal plane are reconstructed from the decomposition coefficients and the accuracies are compared. Results show that the PWM achieves a more accurate reconstruction than the SWM does, and the reconstruction can be effectively done under a compressive sensing framework.