Modeling of finite-amplitude sound beams: second order fields generated by a parametric loudspeaker

Abstract

The nonlinear interaction of sound waves in air has been applied to sound reproduction for audio applications. A directional audible sound can be generated by amplitude-modulating the ultrasound carrier with an audio signal, then transmitting it from a parametric loudspeaker. This brings the need of a computationally efficient model to describe the propagation of finite-amplitude sound beams for the system design and optimization. A quasilinear analytical solution capable of fast numerical evaluation is presented for the second-order fields of the sum-, difference-frequency and second harmonic components. It is based on a virtual-complex-source approach, wherein the source field is treated as an aggregation of a set of complex virtual sources located in complex distance, then the corresponding fundamental sound field is reduced to the computation of sums of simple functions by exploiting the integrability of Gaussian functions. By this result, the five-dimensional integral expressions for the second-order sound fields are simplified to one-dimensional integrals. Furthermore, a substantial analytical reduction to sums of single integrals also is derived for an arbitrary source distribution when the basis functions are expressible as a sum of products of trigonometric functions. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed by a comparison of numerical results with experimental data previously published for the rectangular ultrasonic transducer.