Modeling underwater propagation of acoustic vortex beams by ray methods

Abstract

Acoustic vortex beams have application potentials in the fields of object manipulation and high-speed communication. Due to the additional azimuthal features, modeling the propagation of vortex beams usually requires three-dimensional (3-D) models, which are of high computational cost, especially for large-scale simulations. Here, the two-dimensional (2-D) BELLHOP ray-tracing model is used to simulate the 3-D propagation of acoustic vortex beams in the deep, long-range ocean environment for a low computational cost. The vortex source is constructed by multiple point sources, each with a predefined initial phase to form the vortex wavefront. The 3-D vortex acoustic field is modeled by a sum of the fields simulated for the individual sources in 2-D environments. The results reveal that the traditional 2-D ray-tracing model is an effective tool to study vortex beam propagation in inhomogeneous media, with less complexity compared to finite element simulations using COMSOL Multiphysics.