Computation of Acoustic Scattering from Targets by ACA-BEM

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The computation of the acoustic scattering from objects in the ocean is useful to analyze the characteristics of the targets, which can be numerically modelled by acoustic boundary element method (BEM). The BEM has a defect of fictitious frequency problem, Burton-Miller method is studied to overcome the singular problems. In this paper, the Hadamard finite-part integral method based on collocation method is studied to overcome the singularity. It is found that, the near singularity is also quite significant and deteriorates largely the accuracy of BEM. A method based on polar transformation is proposed in this paper to overcome such a defect. Once the problems of singularity and near-singularity are solved, the conventional BEM model is established to serve as a foundation for fast BEM.It is well known that conventional BEM yields a full matrix, which is of O(N <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) memory complexity. Furthermore, the time complexity could be up to O(N <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> ), if Gaussian elimination method is adopted to solve the linear equation of BEM. Many fast methods are proposed to solve the problems, such as the GMRES iterative solver, fast multipole method and H-matrix (Hierarchical Matrices) method. H-matrix method is applied to overcome the faults of conventional BEM, by using the low-rank approximations to compress blocks of the matrix, which is a pure algebraic method. The ACA (Adaptive Cross Approximation) method is proposed to compute the outer-product form of low-rank matrices, instead of SVD (Singular Value Decomposition), which consumes high CPU time and is of no usability. ACA-BEM is used to predict the acoustic scattering from objects in the ocean, especially the large-scale problems. The directivities of a rigid sphere and a rigid ellipsoid are computed by ACA BEM, the time consumed is very short. For a problem of more than 20,000 DOFs, it can be solved within 2 minutes. Therefore, ACA BEM can be used to solve large-scale acoustic scattering problems very efficiently.