On the Use of Meshless Methods in Acoustic Simulations

Abstract

In this paper, we are investigating the potential and limits of a meshless Lagrangian technique, called Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), as a method for acoustic simulations. Currently the most common techniques for acoustic simulations draw on mesh-based methods such as the Boundary Element Method (BEM), Finite Differences Method (FD) and Finite Element Method (FEM). Though many improvements have been made to each class of methods during the last few years, they still have their weaknesses. Difficulties arise as soon as inhomogeneous media, moving boundaries or aeroacoustic effects are involved. These problems are either particularly hard to describe or cannot be simulated with some of these mesh-based methods. The investigation of SPH for modeling sound propagation is carried out in order to assess its potential in relation to the limitations associated with the existing simulation methods listed above. Simple computational experiments will be carried out for the verification of the new approach and applications on the problems listed above will be discussed.