Unbounded full-aperture acoustic wave experimentation using multidimensional deconvolution

Physical experiments are set up to study acoustic wave propagation in a laboratory. However, wave propagation experiments carried out in a size-limited volume often suffer from unwanted reflections at the boundaries of the experimental domain. We propose a method of multidimensional deconvolution (MDD) to process recorded data such that the undesired imprint of the laboratory boundary is completely removed from the data. The MDD results consist of Green's functions between any pair of points on a mathematically closed receiver surface, sampling the scattering wavefield related to an object of interest with a full aperture. We apply the MDD algorithm to process data recorded in a 2D acoustic waveguide in which a rigid steel block is placed inside of a circular recording array. The scattering imprint of the waveguide boundary is removed from the data, and the scattering Green’s functions only related to this steel block are obtained. The MDD methodology used for the physical experiment is also validated using synthetic simulations; this further corroborates the effectiveness of MDD in obtaining the desired Green's functions associated with arbitrary scatterers in unbounded domains.