Rapid calculations of time-harmonic nearfield pressures produced by rectangular pistons

A rapid method for calculating the nearfield pressure distribution generated by a rectangular piston is derived for time-harmonic excitations. This rapid approach improves the numerical performance relative to the impulse response with an equivalent integral expression that removes the numerical singularities caused by inverse trigonometric functions. The resulting errors are demonstrated in pressure field calculations using the time-harmonic impulse response solution for a rectangular source 5 wavelengths wide by 7.5 wavelengths high. Simulations using this source geometry show that the rapid method eliminates the singularities introduced by the impulse response. The results of pressure field computations are then evaluated in terms of relative errors and computational speeds. The results show that, when the same number of Gauss abscissas are applied to both approaches for time-harmonic pressure field calculations, the rapid method is consistently faster than the impulse response, and the rapid method consistently produces smaller maximum errors than the impulse response. For specified maximum error values of 10% and 1%, the rapid method is 2.6 times faster than the impulse response for pressure field calculations performed on a 61 by 101 point grid. The rapid approach achieves even greater reductions in the computation time for smaller errors and larger grids.