Measurement of indoor air temperature distribution using acoustic travel-time tomography: Optimization of transducers location and sound-ray coverage of the room

Acoustic travel-time TOMography (ATOM) allows the measurement and reconstruction of air temperature distributions. Due to limiting factors, such as the challenge of travel-time estimation of the early reflections in the room impulse response, which heavily depends on the position of transducers inside the measurement area, ATOM is applied mainly outdoors. To apply ATOM in buildings, this paper presents a numerical solution to optimize the positions of transducers. This optimization avoids reflection overlaps, leading to distinguishable travel-times in the impulse response reflectogram. To increase the accuracy of the measured temperature within tomographic voxels, an additional function is employed to the proposed numerical method to minimize the number of sound-path-free voxels, ensuring the best sound-ray coverage of the room. Subsequently, an experimental set-up has been performed to verify the proposed numerical method. The results indicate the positive impact of the optimal positions of transducers on the distribution of ATOM-temperatures