UACE2017 Proceedings: Analytical solutions of superdirectivity for circular arrays with acoustic vector sensors

• Session:
  Vector Hydrophone Research
• Paper:
  Analytical solutions of superdirectivity for circular arrays with acoustic vector sensors
• Author(s):
  Yong Wang, Yixin Yang, Yuanliang Ma, Bing Li, Bo Lei, Xionghou Liu
• Abstract:
  Sensor arrays with superdirectivity are more attractive than conventional sensor arrays in many applications such as sonar, radar, and audio engineering, because they have good performance in terms of angular discrimination, bearing estimation accuracy, and noise suppression ability with a relatively much smaller aperture. A superdirectivity theory termed the eigenbeam decomposition and synthesis theory has been previously proposed for circular pressure sensor arrays. This paper applies this theory in circular vector sensor arrays, which aims to achieving better performance than both superdirective pressure sensor arrays and conventional vector sensor arrays. For simplicity, each sensor of the circular arrays considered only consists of one pressure channel and one particle velocity channel. It is found that the optimal beampattern, global optimum directivity factor, and total error sensitivity function can be accurately expressed as the sum of eigenbeams, sum of their directivity factors, and sum of their sensitivity functions, respectively, with the use of the circulant property of the spatial cross-correlation matrix and the inverse of block matrix. Because the robustness of different eigenbeams are different, a reduced-order technique similar to that proposed for circular pressure sensor arrays can also be used to achieve robust superdirectivity for circular vector sensor arrays. The comparisons between circular pressure sensor arrays with circular vector sensor arrays show that the capability of the latter arrays in improving directivity is better than that of the former arrays.
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Contact details

• Contact person:
  Dr Yong Wang
• e-mail:
  
• Affiliation:
  School of Mechanical Engineering; Xi'an Jiaotong University
• Country:
  China