Reconstruction of plate excitation forces via measurement of radiated acoustic fields

A non-contact method is proposed to reconstruct excitation forces acting on a plate using radiated acoustic field measurements from a microphone array. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on structural vibration measurements, transfer functions, or modal parameters, the proposed method directly relates excitation forces to the radiated acoustic field by combining the force analysis technique (FAT) with the Rayleigh integral. A generalized Tikhonov regularization framework with structural prior information and an iterative reweighting scheme are introduced to improve the stability and localization of the inverse problem. Numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately reconstruct excitation forces without prior structural information. The effects of signal-to-noise ratio, measurement distance, and structural resonance are also investigated.