@phdthesis{Dokhanchi,
  author    = {Dokhanchi, Najmeh Sadat},
  title     = {Measurement of the Indoor Air Temperature Distribution using Acoustic Travel-Time Tomography},
  isbn      = {978-3-00-075344-2 (print)},
  doi       = {10.25643/bauhaus-universitaet.4956},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20230414-49567},
  school      = {Bauhaus-Universit{\"a}t Weimar},
  pages     = {155},
  abstract  = {One of the main criteria determining the thermal comfort of occupants is the air temperature. To monitor this parameter, a thermostat is traditionally mounted in the indoor environment for instance in office rooms in the workplaces, or directly on the radiator or in another location in a room. One of the drawbacks of this conventional method is the measurement at a certain location instead of the temperature distribution in the entire room including the occupant zone. As a result, the climatic conditions measured at the thermostat point may differ from those at the user's location. This not only negatively impacts the thermal comfort assessment but also leads to a waste of energy due to unnecessary heating and cooling. Moreover, for measuring the distribution of the air temperature under laboratory conditions, multiple thermal sensors should be installed in the area under investigation. This requires high effort in both installation and expense. To overcome the shortcomings of traditional sensors, Acoustic travel-time TOMography (ATOM) offers an alternative based on measuring the transmission sound velocity signals. The basis of the ATOM technique is the first-order dependency of the sound velocity on the medium's temperature. The average sound velocity, along the propagation paths, can be determined by travel-times estimation of a defined acoustic signal between transducers. After the travel-times collection, the room is divided into several volumetric grid cells, i.e. voxels, whose sizes are defined depending on the dimension of the room and the number of sound paths. Accordingly, the spatial air temperature in each voxel can be determined using a suitable tomographic algorithm. Recent studies indicate that despite the great potential of this technique to detect room climate, few experiments have been conducted. This thesis aims to develop the ATOM technique for indoor climatic applications while coupling the analysis methods of tomography and room acoustics. The method developed in this thesis uses high-energy early reflections in addition to the direct paths between transducers for travel time estimation. In this way, reflections can provide multiple sound paths that allow the room coverage to be maintained even when a few or even only one transmitter and receiver are used. In the development of the ATOM measurement system, several approaches have been employed, including the development of numerical methods and simulations and conducting experimental measurements, each of which has contributed to the improvement of the system's accuracy. In order to effectively separate the early reflections and ensure adequate coverage of the room with sound paths, a numerical method was developed based on the optimization of the coordinates of the sound transducers in the test room. The validation of the optimal positioning method shows that the reconstructed temperatures were significantly improved by placing the transducers at the optimal coordinates derived from the developed numerical method. The other numerical method developed is related to the selection of the travel times of the early reflections. Accordingly, the detection of the travel times has been improved by adjusting the lengths of the multiple analysis time-windows according to the individual travel times in the reflectogram of the room impulse response. This can reduce the probability of trapping faulty travel times in the analysis time-windows. The simulation model used in this thesis is based on the image source model (ISM) method for simulating the theoretical travel times of early reflection sound paths. The simulation model was developed to simulate the theoretical travel times up to third-order reflections. The empirical measurements were carried out in the climate lab of the Chair of Building Physics under different boundary conditions, i.e., combinations of different room air temperatures under both steady-state and transient conditions, and different measurement setups. With the measurements under controllable conditions in the climate lab, the validity of the developed numerical methods was confirmed. In this thesis, the performance of the ATOM measurement system was evaluated using two measurement setups. The setup for the initial investigations consists of an omnidirectional receiver and a near omnidirectional sound source, keeping the number of transducers as few as possible. This has led to accurately identify the sources of error that could occur in each part of the measuring system. The second measurement setup consists of two directional sound sources and one omnidirectional receiver. This arrangement of transducers allowed a higher number of well-detected travel times for tomography reconstruction, a better travel time estimation due to the directivity of the sound source, and better space utilization. Furthermore, this new measurement setup was tested to determine an optimal selection of the excitation signal. The results showed that for the utilized setup, a linear chirp signal with a frequency range of 200 - 4000 Hz and a signal duration of t = 1 s represents an optimal selection with respect to the reliability of the measured travel times and higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To evaluate the performance of the measuring setups, the ATOM temperatures were always compared with the temperatures of high-resolution NTC thermistors with an accuracy of ±0.2 K. The entire measurement program, including acoustic measurements, simulation, signal processing, and visualization of measurement results are performed in MATLAB software. In addition, to reduce the uncertainty of the positioning of the transducers, the acoustic centre of the loudspeaker was determined experimentally for three types of excitation signals, namely MLS (maximum length sequence) signals with different lengths and duration, linear and logarithmic chirp signals with different defined frequency ranges. For this purpose, the climate lab was converted into a fully anechoic chamber by attaching absorption panels to the entire surfaces of the room. The measurement results indicated that the measurement of the acoustic centre of the sound source significantly reduces the displacement error of the transducer position. Moreover, to measure the air temperature in an occupied room, an algorithm was developed that can convert distorted signals into pure reference signals using an adaptive filter. The measurement results confirm the validity of the approach for a temperature interval of 4 K inside the climate lab. Accordingly, the accuracy of the reconstructed temperatures indicated that ATOM is very suitable for measuring the air temperature distribution in rooms.},
  subject      = {Bauphysik},
  language  = {en}
}
@inproceedings{Dokhanchi,
  author    = {Dokhanchi, Najmeh Sadat},
  title     = {Reconstruction of the indoor air temperature distribution using acoustic travel-time tomography},
  editor    = {Arnold, J{\"o}rg},
  doi       = {10.25643/bauhaus-universitaet.4659},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20220622-46593},
  abstract  = {Acoustic travel-time tomography (ATOM) is being increasingly considered recently as a remote sensing methodology to determine the indoor air temperatures distribution. It employs the relationship between the sound velocities along sound-paths and their related travel-times through measured room-impulse-response (RIR). Thus, the precise travel-time estimation is of critical importance which can be performed by applying an analysis time-window method. In this study, multiple analysis time-windows with different lengths are proposed to overcome the challenge of accurate detection of the travel-times at RIR. Hence, the ATOM-temperatures distribution has been measured at the climate chamber lab of the Bauhaus-University Weimar. As a benchmark, the temperatures of NTC thermistors are compared to the reconstructed temperatures derived from the ATOM technique illustrating this technique can be a reliable substitute for traditional thermal sensors. The numerical results indicate that the selection of an appropriate analysis time-window significantly enhances the accuracy of the reconstructed temperatures distribution.},
  subject      = {Bauphysik},
  language  = {en}
}
@inproceedings{Dokhanchi,
  author    = {Dokhanchi, Najmeh Sadat},
  title     = {Acoustic travel time tomography: Applicability of an array of directional sound sources},
  editor    = {Arnold, J{\"o}rg},
  doi       = {10.25643/bauhaus-universitaet.4658},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20220622-46589},
  abstract  = {The technique of Acoustic travel-time TOMography (ATOM) allows for measuring the distribution of air temperatures throughout the entire room based on the determined sound-travel-times of early reflections, currently up to second order reflections. The number of detected early reflections in the room impulse response (RIR) which stands for the desired sound paths inside the room, has a significant impact on the resolution of reconstructed temperatures. This study investigates the possibility of utilizing an array of directional sound sources for ATOM measurements instead of a single omnidirectional loudspeaker used in the previous studies [1-3]. The developed measurement setup consists of two directional sound sources placed near the edge of the floor in the climate chamber of the Bauhaus-University Weimar and one omnidirectional receiver at center of the room near the ceiling. In order to compensate for the reduced number of sound paths when using directional sound sources, it is proposed to take high-energy early reflections up to third order into account. For this purpose, the simulated travel times up to third-order image sources were implemented in the image source model (ISM) algorithm, by which these early reflections can be detected effectively for air temperature reconstructions. To minimize the uncertainties of travel-times estimation due to the positioning of the sound transducers inside the room, measurements were conducted to determine the exact emitting point of the utilized sound source i.e. its acoustic center (AC). For these measurements, three types of excitation signals (MLS, linear and logarithmic chirp signals) with various frequency ranges were used considering that the acoustic center of a sound source is a frequency dependent parameter [4]. Furthermore, measurements were conducted to determine an optimum excitation signal based on the given condition of the ATOM measurement set-up which defines an optimum method for the RIR estimation correspondingly. Finally, the uncertainty of the measuring system utilizing an array of directional sound sources was analyzed.},
  subject      = {Bauphysik},
  language  = {en}
}
@inproceedings{DokhanchiArnoldVogeletal.,
  author    = {Dokhanchi, Najmeh Sadat and Arnold, J{\"o}rg and Vogel, Albert and V{\"o}lker, Conrad},
  title     = {Acoustic Travel-Time Tomography: Optimal Positioning of Transceiver and Maximal Sound-Ray Coverage of the Room},
  series = {Fortschritte der Akustik - DAGA 2019},
  booktitle = {Fortschritte der Akustik - DAGA 2019},
  doi       = {10.25643/bauhaus-universitaet.3877},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20190408-38778},
  pages     = {4},
  abstract  = {Acoustic travel-time tomography (ATOM) determines the distribution of the temperature in a propagation medium by measuring the travel-time of acoustic signals between transmitters and receivers. To employ ATOM for indoor climate measurements, the impulse responses have been measured in the climate chamber lab of the Bauhaus-University Weimar and compared with the theoretical results of its image source model (ISM). A challenging task is distinguishing the reflections of interest in the reflectogram when the sound rays have similar travel-times. This paper presents a numerical method to address this problem by finding optimal positions of transmitter and receiver, since they have a direct impact on the distribution of travel times. These optimal positions have the minimum number of simultaneous arrival time within a threshold level. Moreover, for the tomographic reconstruction, when some of the voxels remain empty of sound-rays, it leads to inaccurate determination of the air temperature within those voxels. Based on the presented numerical method, the number of empty tomographic voxels are minimized to ensure the best sound-ray coverage of the room. Subsequently, a spatial temperature distribution is estimated by simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique (SIRT). The experimental set-up in the climate chamber verifies the simulation results.},
  subject      = {Bauphysik},
  language  = {en}
}