Performace analysis of acoustic antennas

One of the most common applications of the acoustic antennas is the detection and the localization of acoustic sources. Different parameters (geometric position of the microphones in the array, distance between antenna and the sources, quality of the used microphones, data acquisition system, and so on) influence the quality of the measure of acoustic sources position. In this paper, the authors present an analysis of the effect of the above mentioned parameters to the acoustic antennas performances in terms of uncertainty in the measure of sources position. These information can be used in the design phase allowing the correct choice of the different parts composing the acoustic antenna system in order to grant the desired measurement uncertainty. The analysis was carried out in a simulation environment (using a dedicated numerical model to theoretically predict the signals produced by each microphone) finally experimental tested on both linear and bi-dimensional shape acoustic antennas.