Duct mode identification in a statistical model via the Iterative Bayesian Focusing

The measurements of aero-engine fan noise are crucial to engine-noise reduction and silent -turbofan design. The duct mode identification is adpoted to decompose inner duct noises into spinning modes from acoustic pressure measured by a microphone array. However, modes identification of the aero-engine fan are difficult cause the number of modes is usually much larger than the number of microphones and leading to an ill-posed problem during the inverse process. A mode identification method based on Iterative Bayesian Focusing is used to solve this problem. The in-duct sound field is described by a statistical model, and the inverse problem of mode identification is expressed in a Bayesian framework. The sparsity of the target acoustic modes is applied as a priori condition, and a Mode Aperture Function (MAF) is developed. The aperture width of the MAFis automatically updated and contracted through iterations, after which mode coefficients are contracted to a sparsest solution. The used mode identification method is firstly validated through numerical simulations, and the effects of the number of mi-crophones and SNR on mode identification results are discussed. Then the Iterative Bayesian Focusing-based mode identification method is experimentally verified through a well designed Spinning Mode Synthesizer. Both numerical and experimentalresults indicate that target modes can be accurately identified when the number of microphones are much less than the number of all propagating modes.

Automated summary

This article introduces a method for mode identification of aero-engie fan noise and verifies its effectiveness through numerical simulations and experiments. The method uses iterative Bayesian focusing to solve the ill-posed problem in mode identification, and can accurately identify target modes when the number of microphones is much less than the number of modes.