A novel indoor beamformer design method with obstacles

In designing beamformers, obstacles in the domain are often neglected due to a lack of model in handling sound wave propagation around objects. To address this problem, the governing conservation laws for acoustic perturbation are solved directly together with objects in a computation domain so as to correctly capture the complex sound wave propagation. The conservation laws are solved by using direct aeroacoustic simulation technique based on the conservation element and solution element (CE/SE) scheme. Obstacles inside the computational domain will be described as barriers and reflective boundary conditions are imposed. With the estimated impulse responses, better beamformers can be designed via optimization. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the proposed beamformer design method. This paper reports the first study of optimal beamformer design problem with obstacles inside the domain of interest.