To assess the thermal comfort in the indoor spaces such as office rooms generally a large number of thermal sensors is mounted in the workplaces. The main drawback of this conventional method is recording data at certain locations instead of distribution of the target parameter in the entire room including the occupant zone. To overcome the shortcomings of traditional sensors, Acoustic travel-time TOMography (ATOM) offers an alternative based on measuring the transmission sound velocity signals.

This presentation reports research on development of the ATOM measuring system at the Bauhaus-University Weimar while coupling the analysis methods of tomography and room acoustics. The developed method uses high-energy early reflections in addition to the direct paths between transducers for the 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. The approaches have been used to develop the ATOM system include development of numerical methods and simulations and conducting experimental measurements.  The measurement results and accuracy analyses indicate that the ATOM method is very suitable for measuring the temperature distribution in rooms.