Study of the comparison of the methods of equivalent sources and boundary element methods for near-field acoustic holography.

Boundary element methods (BEM) based near-field acoustic holography (NAH) has been used successfully in order to reconstruct the normal velocity on an arbitrarily shaped structure surface from measurements of the pressure field on a nearby conformal surface. An alternative approach for this reconstruction on a general structure utilizes the equivalent sources method (ESM). In ESM the acoustic field is represented by a set of point sources located over a surface that is close to the structure surface. This approach is attractive mainly for its simplicity of implementation and speed. In this work ESM as an approximation of BEM based NAH is studied and the necessary conditions for the successful application of this approach in NAH is discussed. A cylindrical fuselage surface excited by a point force as an example to validate the results is used.