Sound propagation in inhomogeneous waveguides with sound-speed profiles using the multimodal admittance method

Abstract

The multimodal admittance method and its improvement are presented to deal with various aspects in underwater acoustics, mostly for the sound propagation in inhomogeneous waveguides with sound-speed profiles, arbitrary-shaped liquid-like scatterers, and range-dependent environments. In all cases, the propagation problem governed by the Helmholtz equation is transformed into initial value problems of two coupled first-order evolution equations with respect to the modal components of field quantities (sound pressure and its derivative), by projecting the Helmholtz equation on a constructed orthogonal and complete local basis. The admittance matrix, which is the modal representation of Direchlet-to-Neumann operator, is introduced to compute the first-order evolution equations with no numerical instability caused by evanescent modes. The fourth-order Magnus scheme is used for the numerical integration of differential equations in the numerical implementation. The numerical experiments of sound field in underwater inhomogeneous waveguides generated by point sources are performed. Besides, the numerical results computed by simulation software COMSOL Multiphysics are given to validate the correction of the multimodal admittance method. It is shown that the multimodal admittance method is an efficient and stable numerical method to solve the wave propagation problem in inhomogeneous underwater waveguides with sound-speed profiles, liquid-like scatterers, and range-dependent environments. The extension of the method to more complicated waveguides such as horizontally stratified waveguides is available.