Measurement of the Acoustic Reflection Coefficient of Materials Based on Signal Subspace Decomposition Using a Single Vector Hydrophone

A method is presented for measuring the reflection coefficient of underwater acoustic materials in the free field with a single vector hydrophone. The main advantage of this method is that the incident and reflected signals are separated in the signal subspace without considering the aliasing of direct and reflected signals in the time domain. The postprocessing inverse filter technology is introduced into the measurement. The signal distortion caused by the transfer function of the measurement system is compensated for the postprocessing inverse filter, which is conducive to eliminating the interference of the edge diffraction. The basic mechanism is based on signal subspace decomposition and postprocessing inverse filter technology. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the advantages of the method. The findings are confirmed by an underwater experiment conducted with a single vector hydrophone. The experimental results show that a satisfactory reflection coefficient can be obtained using this method, and the results agree well with the numerical predictions. The relative error of the measurement results is no more than 20%.