Modal beamforming for circular acoustic vector sensor arrays

In this paper, modal beamformers for circular vector sensor arrays are investigated. As an alternative to existing methods for pressure and 2-dimensional (2D) particle velocity sensor arrays, a modal beamformer for circular arrays of 1D acoustic vector sensors is presented. Directivity performance of these modal beamformers are analyzed and the proposed method is shown to perform better compared to pressure arrays due to improved white noise gain. Furthermore, it is aslo shown that the proposed method can achieve a directivity performance similar to that of the 2D vector sensor array using only half the number of sensors.