Acoustic Travel-Time Tomography: Optimal Positioning of Transceiver and Maximal Sound-Ray Coverage of the Room

Acoustic travel-time tomography (ATOM) determines the distribution of the temperature in a propagation medium by measuring the travel-time of acoustic signals between transmitters and receivers. To employ ATOM for indoor climate measurements, the impulse responses have been measured in the climate chamber lab of the Bauhaus-University Weimar and compared with the theoretical results of its image source model (ISM). A challenging task is distinguishing the reflections of interest in the reflectogram when the sound rays have similar travel-times. This paper presents a numerical method to address this problem by finding optimal positions of transmitter and receiver, since they have a direct impact on the distribution of travel times. These optimal positions have the minimum number of simultaneous arrival time within a threshold level. Moreover, for the tomographic reconstruction, when some of the voxels remain empty of sound-rays, it leads to inaccurate determination of the air temperature within those voxels. Based on the presented numerical method, the number of empty tomographic voxels are minimized to ensure the best sound-ray coverage of the room. Subsequently, a spatial temperature distribution is estimated by simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique (SIRT). The experimental set-up in the climate chamber verifies the simulation results