A fast boundary element method for underwater acoustics

Abstract

A fast algorithm for the boundary element method is developed to handle problems in underwater acoustics. The algorithm employs the multipole and local expansions to approximate far-field potentials, and exploits the discrete convolution nature of mapping multipole to local expansions to accelerate the potential evaluation process. The speedup in the solution process is achieved by fast Fourier transform on the multipole and local expansion coefficients on a regular grid. The method is demonstrated by a three-dimensional underwater acoustics scattering problem, and it is found to achieve accurate results with relatively low order of expansion. © World Scientific Publishing Company.