Prediction of Exterior Sound Pressure Field of a Cylinder Using the Boundary Element Method

AbstractThe prediction of sound pressure field in the acoustic domain caused by a diffracting object is of interest in many fields of acoustics. Applications in acoustics include detecting, locating and classifying objects that generate a scattered sound field excited by the incident sound waves. For example, relevant to these applications; the exterior sound pressure field in the acoustic domain due to incident plane waves on a cylinder can be determined analytically and numerically. For the numerical investigation the Finite Element Method (FEM) is widely used. However, for the exterior acoustic problem the FEM requires discretization everywhere in the entire domain, which results in increase of computational time to solve the problem. In order to overcome this problem, the Boundary Element Method (BEM) has been used in the current work to construct a suitable numerical model. The analytical results confirmed the accuracy of the numerical results obtained using the BEM