Development of a Reference Method Based on the Fast Multipole Boundary Element Method for Sound Propagation Problems in Urban Environments PDF Download

Author: Xavier Vuylsteke
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Described as one of the best ten algorithms of the 20th century, the fast multipole formalism applied to the boundary element method allows to handle large problems which were inconceivable only a few years ago. Thus, the motivation of the present work is to assess the ability, as well as the benefits in term of computational resources provided by the application of this formalism to the boundary element method, for solving sound propagation problems and providing reference solutions, in three dimensional dense urban environments, in the aim of assessing or improving fast engineering tools. We first introduce the mathematical background required for the derivation of the boundary integral equation, for solving sound propagation problems in unbounded domains. We discuss the conventional and hyper-singular boundary integral equation to overcome the numerical artifact of fictitious eigen-frequencies, when solving exterior problems. We then make a brief historical and technical overview of the fast multipole principle and introduce the mathematical tools required to expand the elementary solution of the Helmholtz equation and describe the main steps, from a numerical viewpoint, of fast multipole calculations. A sound propagation problem in a city block made of 5 buildings allows us to highlight instabilities in the recursive computation of translation matrices, resulting in discontinuities of the surface pressure and a no convergence of the iterative solver. This observation leads us to consider the very recent work of Gumerov & Duraiswamy, related to a ``stable'' recursive computation of rotation matrices coefficients in the RCR decomposition. This new improved algorithm has been subsequently assessed successfully on a multi scattering problem up to a dimensionless domain size equal to 207 wavelengths. We finally performed comparisons between a BEM algorithm, extit{Micado3D}, the FMBEM algorithm and a ray tracing algorithm, Icare, for the calculation of averaged pressure levels in an opened and closed court yards. The fast multipole algorithm allowed to validate the results computed with Icare in the opened court yard up to 300 Hz corresponding, (i.e. 100 wavelengths), while in the closed court yard, a very sensitive area without direct or reflective fields, further investigations related to the preconditioning seem required to ensure reliable solutions provided by iterative solver based algorithms.