BEM method to analyze the interaction of an acoustic pulse with a rigid circular disk (Q1098670)

Very little has been written about the transient time-domain interaction of an incident acoustic pulse with a fixed rigid disk. It is well known that the formulation of such a transient interaction problem can be reduced to a singular integral equation. For a rigid disk this integral equation is defined over the insonified side of the disk, where it relates the unknown difference between the fields at the insonified and shadow sides to an inhomogeneous term, which is defined by the incident wave. Even though the integral equation, which involves integrations both over space and time, can be reduced to an equation involving integration over the spatial domain only, it cannot be solved analytically. As shown in this paper, it is, however, possible to obtain a numerical solution by a direct time-stepping approach in conjunction with a boundary element discretization. As an alternative to a direct time-domain approach, it is possible to use Fourier superposition in which the problem is solved in the frequency domain by the boundary element method or some other method, and the fast Fourier transform is subsequently employed to construct the solution in the time domain. For a steep pulse, this requires calculations over a considerable frequency range. Accurate frequency- domain calculations can become quite cumbersome at higher frequencies.