ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

2pUW20. Solution of the acoustic wave equation in underwater environments using an improved finite difference method.

R. A. Zingarelli

Naval Res. Lab., Acoust. Simulation Section, Stennis Space Center, MS 39529

At the fall meeting, a finite difference solution to the acoustic wave equation for real pressure fields, its implementation, and several applications were presented. An improved differencing scheme developed by Cole et al. has subsequently been incorporated into this numerical model. Using this method runtimes and memory usage for cw problems have been reduced by factors of 10 and 5, respectively, with no loss of accuracy or computational parallelism, making its computational requirements similar to other solution techniques. Because the weightings of various grid elements in this method are based on the source frequency, its usefulness in TD calculations with pulsed sources is limited. Despite this, some low-frequency TD calculations are possible. Applications and limitations of the higher-order method will be presented. [Work supported by ONR.]