Acoustic velocity measurement by means of Laser Doppler Velocimetry: Development of an Extended Kalman Filter and validation in free-field measurement

•Acoustic particle velocity parameters estimation.•Laser Doppler Velocimetry.•Quadrature demodulation and Extended Kalman Filter.•Cramer–Rao Bounds and Monte-Carlo simulation.•Free field measurements.

A signal processing technique, based on the use of an Extended Kalman Filter, has been developed to measure sound fields by means of Laser Doppler Velocimetry in weak flow. This method allows for the parametric estimation of both the acoustic particle and flow velocity for a forced sine-wave excitation where the acoustic frequency is known. The measurements are performed from the in-phase and the quadrature components of the Doppler downshifted signal thanks to an analog quadrature demodulation technique. Then, the estimated performance is illustrated by means of Monte-Carlo simulations obtained from synthesized signals and compared with asymptotic and analytical forms for the Cramer–Rao Bounds. Results allow the validity domain of the method to be defined and show the availability for free-field measurements in a large range. Finally, an application based on real data obtained in free field is presented.