Ray acoustic modeling of the surface fields of a submerged elastic cylindrical shell with hemispherical endcaps

Abstract

Combining the available ray acoustic algorithms descriptive of submerged thin cylindrical and spherical shells, this paper formulates the pressure and velocity distributions on a hemispherically capped cylindrical shell insonified by an obliquely incident acoustic plane wave. As the first ray acoustic model for a noncanonical shell geometry of considerable current interest, it neglects wave coupling and diffraction due to curvature discontinuities at the junctures as well as contributions from the leaky waves excited through the endcaps. This might be justifiable, because the junctions are not sharp edges (i.e., the normals are continuous) and because the cylinder under consideration is very long compared to the radius. By matching the surface wave vector along the joints, however, due account is taken of leaky wave propagation on, and radiation from, the hemispheres. The total pressure or velocity—their ray constituents are related to each other by appropriate impedances—on the cylinder is then synthesiz...