Fast computation of time-dependent acoustic fields

Area of Science:

• Acoustics
• Computational physics
• Numerical methods

Background:

• Evaluating time-dependent acoustic fields from complex sources is computationally intensive.
• Existing methods often struggle with the computational demands of large-scale acoustic simulations.
• Accurate transient acoustic field prediction is crucial for applications like noise control and structural acoustics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel, fast method for evaluating time-dependent acoustic fields from complex sources.
• To demonstrate the computational efficiency of the proposed technique for transient acoustic signal calculation.
• To assess the scalability of the method with an increasing number of acoustic sources.

Main Methods:

• The method employs a fast integration technique for boundary integrals within a Kirchhoff formulation.
• It involves a pre-processing stage followed by a rapid computation of transient acoustic signals.
• The approach was tested using single rotor, counter-rotating open rotor, and broadband volume source configurations.

Main Results:

• The developed method achieves a fast evaluation of time-dependent acoustic fields.
• Transient signal computation requires a small and relatively constant computation time after pre-processing.
• For an array of 16,384 sources, transient field calculations were an order of magnitude faster than traditional methods.
• The computational advantage increases with a higher number of sources.

Conclusions:

• The presented method offers a significant computational speed-up for time-dependent acoustic field evaluations.
• The technique is particularly advantageous for complex sources with a large number of individual emitters.
• This fast evaluation method has the potential to enhance simulations in acoustics and related fields.