Consider an object connected to a source tube as shown in figure
5.1. Notice that for a musical wind instrument, the
input plane is the position at which the mouthpiece must be placed if the
instrument is to be played. In order to carry out pulse reflectometry
experiments, the mouthpiece must be removed to prevent leaks and to
allow efficient transfer of acoustical energy into and out of the instrument.
The length of the cylindrical sections is where
is the
sample period such that the time for travel from the left hand side of a
cylinder to the right hand side, reflection off the discontinuity and return
to the left hand side will correspond to one sample in the time domain.
We label section 1 as the plane at the end of the source tube. The
forward and backward going waves here are labelled and
respectively. Section 2 is then the plane immediately on the other side of
the input plane discontinuity. Section 3 is a distance
away
at the other end of the first cylindrical section used in approximating the
bore of the object. Section 4 is the plane immediately on the other side
of the next discontinuity and so on.
We define the input impulse response as the sequence of reflections which
return from the object under test when an ideal delta function impulse is fed
into the input. We define as the time of arrival of the input pulse at
the input plane. The forward going wave on section 1 is then an impulse