No label defined (Q4355573)

Two methods are available to calculate pressure fields radiated by various transducer shapes in the context of linear acoustics. The former is the diffraction impulse response method which can be applied to various geometries, and in particular to triangular source which approximates transducer boundary with a curvilinear shape, and the latter is the plane wave combination method which treats the pressure field as a combination of geometric waves plus edges waves. In this paper, a modified method is derived for calculating the pressure field in the case of plane and spherically focused ultrasonic transducers with uniform distribution of amplitudes. The geometric wave plus edge wave approach is extended to transducers carried by a sphere. For a plane or spherical uniform transducer, the method leads to a simple line integral around the edge of the radiator (interpreted as a sum of the geometric plane or spherical wave and a boundary diffraction wave) instead of the conventional surface integral or the Rayleigh integral. The method has two advantages: it can deal with complex transducer shapes for which an analytical diffraction impulse response function is not tractable, and it is faster than the Rayleigh integral method. Comparison of transient pressure time waveforms obtained by the line integral method with those obtained by conventional methods shows an excellent agreement. Test cases are presented for shell and spherical sections. The computation times are approximately 3 times and 50 times faster than those in the impulse diffraction and in the Rayleigh integral method, respectively. For a semi-spherical shell, the computation time in the impulse response method is approximately 15 times shorter than in the Rayleigh method.