A substructuring approach for modeling the acoustic scattering from stiffened submerged shells coupled to non-axisymmetric internal structures.

Abstract

The scattered pressure from a stiffened axisymmetric submerged shell impinged by acoustic plane waves has been investigated experimentally, analytically and through numerical models. In the case where the shell is periodically stiffened, it is shown that helical, Bragg, and Bloch-Floquet waves can propagate. The influence of non-axisymmetric internal frames on these scattering phenomena is nevertheless not well known, as it can considerably increase the computational cost. To overcome this issue, the condensed transfer function (CTF) method, which has been developed to couple subsystems along linear junctions in the case of a mechanical excitation, is extended to acoustical excitations. It consists in approximating transfer functions on the junctions and deducing the behavior of the coupled system using the superposition principle and the continuity equations at the junctions. In particular, the CTF method can be used to couple a dedicated model of an axisymmetric stiffened submerged shell with non-axisymmetric internal structures modeled by the finite element method. Incident plane waves are introduced in the formulation and far-field reradiated pressure is estimated. An application consisting of a stiffened shell with curved plates connecting the ribs is considered. Supplementary Bloch-Floquet trajectories are observed in the frequency-angle spectrum and are explained using a simplified interference model.