A cylindrical expansion of the audio sound for a steerable parametric array loudspeaker

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2021-11, Vol.150 (5), p.3797-3806
• Main Authors: Zhong, Jiaxin, Kirby, Ray, Karimi, Mahmoud, Zou, Haishan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/10.0007280

In this work, a cylindrical expansion for the audio sound generated by a steerable baffled parametric array loudspeaker (PAL) based on the phased array technique is derived from the Westervelt equation. The expansion is a series of twofold summations with uncoupled angular and radial components in the cylindrical coordinate system. The angular component is determined by the trigonometric functions, and the radial component is an integral containing the Bessel functions and an arbitrary excitation velocity profile. The numerical results for a typical steerable PAL are presented and compared to those obtained using the convolution model. It is found that the prediction of the audio sound using the proposed cylindrical expansion improves the agreement with the experimental results when compared to the existing models. This is because no further approximations are required in the cylindrical expansion of the quasilinear solution of the Westervelt equation, whereas the complex near field nonlinear interactions between the ultrasonic waves cannot be correctly captured in a convolution model. The proposed cylindrical expansion does, therefore, provide an alternative approach to modeling a phased array PAL and high accuracy with a relatively low computational cost.