A new infinite element paradigm in computational structural acoustics?

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2017-05, Vol.141 (5), p.3977-3977
• Main Authors: Burnett, David S., Wigdor, Les H.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4989077

In the 1990s, the lead author developed a radical new formulation for infinite elements for modeling scattering and radiation from structures in unbounded domains. It was shown to be faster than the popular boundary element method (BEM), for the same physics to the same accuracy, by several orders of magnitude; the speedup is unbounded as problem size increases. Academia and industry called it a “revolution” in computational acoustics that would probably bring an end to the BEM. But then Bell Labs patented and licensed the elements, effectively ending the “revolution” and removing the technology from the public domain for the next 20 years. Now, in 2017, some patents have expired and the rest will expire soon, thus restoring the technology to the public domain. The talk will review the original technology and then describe new R&D since 2015: (i) speeding up a commercial acoustic scattering code by 1400x and (ii) extending the technology by developing a new hybrid version that computes the external field over 12,000x faster than the traditional, expensive Helmholtz integral. Now that this “revolutionary” technology is back in the public domain, the market place can finally decide whether it constitutes a new paradigm in computational structural acoustics.