THE MULTISCALE VTCR APPROACH APPLIED TO ACOUSTICS PROBLEMS
Abstract
An approach, called the "Variational Theory of Complex Rays," was proposed recently for calculating the vibrations of slightly damped elastic structures in the medium-frequency range. One key feature of this approach is the use of a new variational formulation of the vibration problem which allows the shape functions to be discontinuous across element boundaries, thus giving this strategy great flexibility and robustness. This method was fully developed for structural vibrations. In this paper, we apply it to acoustics problems. Examples of two-dimensional Helmholtz problems show that this method is very robust and accurate yet requires much less computational effort than the finite element method, which enables one to use it up to much higher frequencies.
