Recovering the Free-Field Acoustic Characteristics of a Vibrating Structure from Bounded Noisy Underwater Environments

The vibrational behavior of an underwater structure in the free field is different from that in bounded noisy environments because the fluid–structure interaction is strong in the water and the vibration of the structure caused by disturbing fields (the reflections by boundaries and the fields radiated by sources of disturbances) cannot be ignored. The conventional free field recovery (FFR) technique can only be used to eliminate disturbing fields without considering the difference in the vibrational behavior of the structure in the free field and the complex environment. To recover the free-field acoustic characteristics of a structure from bounded noisy underwater environments, a method combining the boundary element method (BEM) with the vibro-acoustic coupling method is presented. First, the pressures on the measurement surface are obtained. Second, the outgoing sound field and the rigid body scattered sound field are calculated by BEM. Then, the vibro-acoustic coupling method is employed to calculate the elastically radiated scattered sound field. Finally, the sound field radiated by the structure in the free field is recovered by subtracting the rigid body scattered sound field and the elastically radiated scattered sound field from the outgoing sound field. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by simulation results.