A FINITE ELEMENT CODE FOR THE NUMERICAL SOLUTION OF THE HELMHOLTZ EQUATION IN AXIALLY SYMMETRIC WAVEGUIDES WITH INTERFACES

We consider the Helmholtz equation in an axisymmetric cylindrical waveguide consisting of fluid layers overlying a rigid bottom. The medium may have range-dependent speed of sound and interface and bottom topography in the interior nonhomogeneous part of the waveguide, while in the far-field the interfaces and bottom are assumed to be horizontal and the problem separable. A nonlocal boundary condition based on the DtN map of the exterior problem is posed at the far-field artificial boundary. The problem is discretized by a standard Galerkin/finite element method and the resulting numerical scheme is implemented in a Fortran code that is interfaced with general mesh generation programs from the MODULEF finite element library and iterative linear solvers from QMRPACK. The code is tested on several small scale examples of acoustic propagation and scattering in the sea and its results are found to compare well with those of COUPLE.