This paper investigates the reconstruction of the vibratory field and structural intensity of transversely vibrating plates using a single moving sensor. Two kinds of sensors are considered; a moving microphone traversing an arbitrary path and a laser vibrometer scanning an arbitrary measurement line. The corresponding measurement time histories are used to reconstruct the dynamic displacement field. The plate displacement is approximated by a series of appropriate functions with unknown coefficients. The field is reconstructed using pseudoinverse procedure and structural intensity diagrams are extracted to identify energy sources, sinks, and streamlines. To investigate the validity of the proposed method, numerically simulated time histories along with experimental data are employed. In the simulation part, as a case study, a rectangular plate excited by a harmonic point force and attached to a dashpot is considered. Then, the simulated measurement data are extracted using the structural model. Next, adding random noise to the simulated measurement data, different numerical simulations are conducted and the effects of sensor traverse path, approximation series length, excitation frequency, sampling rate, noise level, and sensor speed are studied. In the experimental part, sound pressure radiated by a vibrating rectangular plate is measured on two arbitrary traverse paths using a microphone. The measured data are employed to reconstruct the vibratory field. The presented results confirm the potentials of the proposed method to reconstruct single-harmony vibratory fields. Since the proposed method works with different arbitrary paths, it allows the application of manually moving devices to perform vibrational measurements which can provide great practical benefits.
