Applying acoustic array processing to the estimation of the propagation speed of waves in a car exhaust

A parametric method based on spatial filter techniques (beamforming) is proposed to estimate the propagation speed of acoustic waves. The propagation speed estimate is analyzed for the case of narrowband signals and compared to the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of the propagation speed. It is shown that for an array of 3 sensors our estimate coincides with the ML estimate but its performance analysis is simpler and its computational cost is much more reduced. The proposed estimate is also applied to the wideband waves propagating along a car exhaust. It is shown that the signal-to-noise ratio and the magnitude of the relative aperture (distance between the array sensors respect to the wavelength) for each frequency could limit the good performance of the speed estimator. Good results have been achieved when these limitations have been taken into account