Particle velocity estimation based on a two-microphone array and Kalman filter

A traditional method to measure particle velocity is based on the finite difference (FD) approximation of pressure gradient by using a pair of well matched pressure microphones. This approach is known to be sensitive to sensor noise and mismatch. Recently, a double hot-wire sensor termed Microflown became available in light of micro-electro-mechanical system technology. This sensor eliminates the robustness issue of the conventional FD-based methods. In this paper, an alternative two-microphone approach termed the u-sensor is developed from the perspective of robust adaptive filtering. With two ordinary microphones, the proposed u-sensor does not require novel fabrication technology. In the method, plane wave and spherical wave models are employed in the formulation of a Kalman filter with process and measurement noise taken into account. Both numerical and experimental investigations were undertaken to validate the proposed u-sensor technique. The results have shown that the proposed approach attained better performance than the FD method, and comparable performance to a Microflown sensor.