On the sound field of a shallow spherical shell in an infinite baffle

Abstract

A method is presented for calculating the far field sound radiation from a shallow spherical shell in an acoustic medium. The shell has a concentrated ring mass boundary condition at its perimeter representing a loudspeaker voice coil and is excited by a concentrated ring force exerted by the end of the voice coil. A Green's function is developed for a shallow spherical shell, which is based upon Reissner's solution to the shell wave equation [Q. Appl. Math. 13, 279-290 (1955)]. The shell is then coupled to the surrounding acoustic medium using an eigenfunction expansion, with unknown coefficients, for its deflection. The resulting surface pressure distribution is solved using the King integral together with the free space Green's function in cylindrical coordinates. In order to eliminate the need for numerical integration, the radiation (coupling) integrals are solved analytically to yield fast converging expansions. Hence, a set of simultaneous equations is obtained which is solved for the coefficients of the eigenfunction expansion. These coefficients are finally used in formulas for the far field sound radiation.