High-Resolution Fast-Rotating Sound Localization Based on Modal Composition Beamforming and Bayesian Inversion

Rotating source beamforming techniques have been effective means of noise localization on rotary machines. In this letter, we derive an alternative expression for modal composition beamforming (MCB) and subsequently consider the equivalent source assumption and cyclostationarity of the constant angular-speed rotating sound source so that a rotating sound source power (RSP) propagation model is derived. By estimating a suitable solution for the RSP model using the subspace variational Bayesian (SVB) technique with sparsity and total variation (TV) priors, the validity of the RSP model was established. According to the simulation results, the proposed RSP-SVB method leads to a significantly higher resolution than the MCB method. It can localize multiple fast-rotating sound sources accurately, rapidly, and effectively in environments with strong background noise interference. Therefore, our proposed RSP-SVB can offer a reliable solution for identifying fast-rotating blade noise.