Determinig of the Sound Power of the Fan in In Situ Conditions Using the Virtual Reference Source Method

Sound power is one of the basic parameters characterizing the sound source and has a direct impact on the acoustic climate in its surroundings. Therefore, the determining of the sound power of machines is a practical problem. While there are many methods of determining the sound power, each of them has its own limitations. The authors presented the implementation of a comparative method of determining the sound power with the use of a virtual reference source. The method was used to test a high-efficiency flue gas exhaust fan installed on a laboratory stand. The sound source was placed in the geometric centre of the fan and the acoustic field distribution in the room was determined using geometrical methods. After determining the influence factors, the value of the source sound power of the source was calculated by means of the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse. Since the problem under study belongs to the inverse problems, the Tikhonov regularization was used, where the value of the parameter α was determined by the L-curve method.