The factorization method and Capon’s method for random source identification in experimental aeroacoustics

Experimental aeroacoustics is concerned with the estimation of acoustic source power distributions, which are for instance caused by fluid structure interactions on scaled aircraft models inside a wind tunnel, from microphone array measurements of associated sound pressure fluctuations. In the frequency domain aeroacoustic sound propagation can be modelled as a random source problem for a convected Helmholtz equation. This article is concerned with the inverse random source problem to recover the support of an uncorrelated aeroacoustic source from correlations of observed pressure signals. We show a variant of the factorization method from inverse scattering theory can be used for this purpose. We also discuss a surprising relation between the factorization method and a commonly used beam-forming algorithm from experimental aeroacoustics, which is known as Capon’s method or as the minimum variance method. Numerical examples illustrate our theoretical findings.