Recently, the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method has been frequently used for the analysis of underwater sound propagation. There are demonstrated advantages of this FDTD method in terms of obtaining data regarding snapshots of sound pressure distribution and a series of waveforms at any point. In addition, the method facilitates the modeling of factors, such as the sound source and media into the analysis domain. In this study, a three-dimensional FDTD analysis was carried out in order to obtain the sound field focused by a biconcave acoustic lens specialized to measure the normal incidence of the spherical wave. Additionally, the results of the analysis were compared with experimental results obtained in a water tank. When the frequency of the sound source was 500 kHz, the range between the acoustic lens and the sound source was 1.78 m, and the attenuation constant was 0.5–1.0 dB/λ, the experimental results regarding the position of the focal point, the on-axis characteristics and the beam pattern were all found to agree well with the simulation results obtained by FDTD method.
Much attention has been paid to the new idea of detecting objects using ocean ambient noise. This concept is called ambient noise imaging (ANI). In this study, sound fields focused by an acoustic lens system constructed with a single biconcave lens were analyzed using the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method for realizing an ANI system. The size of the lens aperture that would have sufficient resolution-for example, the beam width is 1 at 60 kHz-was roughly determined by comparing the image points and À3 dB areas of sound pressure fields generated by lenses with various apertures. Then, in another FDTD analysis, we successfully used a lens with a determined aperture to detect rigid target objects in an acoustic noise field generated by a large number of point sources.
In this paper, the authors describe the development of a mathematical model of a controllable vibration damper intended for eventual application to ground-vehicle suspension systems. The damper under investigation employs electro-rheological (ER) fluid as the working medium which enables a continuously variable damping force to be provided in response to an electrical control signal. There are some difficulties inherent in characterizing the ER damper's behaviour which the present study attempts to overcome.The paper begins by describing a novel form of non-dimensionalization which drastically reduces the number of variables required to characterize the quasi-steady behaviour of the ER fluid. The construction of the ER damper is described and, on the basis of physical reasoning, it is shown how a dynamic model can be derived by taking account of ER fluid inertia and compressibility. A recently developed iterative scheme is introduced in order to solve the resulting non-linear equations of motion. The paper concludes with a case study involving the application of the ER damper to controlling the lateral vibrations of a rail vehicle.
We present a method for generating a nondiffraction
beam using an annular transducer array.
In this method, each element is driven with equiamplitude
and with an antiphase from its neighboring elements.
Theoretical and experimental analyses of an array of this
type have been carried out, and the feasibility of this method is
confirmed.
The beam from a continuous wave is shown using radiated pressure
magnitude distributions and it is shown that there exist most
suitable values of the width and number of elements.
When the array is driven by a burst signal,
the beam propagates as a plane wave which has an amplitude
corresponding to the zeroth-order Bessel function of the
first kind, J
0.
Since this beam is realized by an annular array consisting of
a few elements,
it suggests the possibility of a transducer of this form
developing into a source
which generates nondiffraction beams.
The decomposition of the time reversal operator (DORT) method is a selective detection and focusing technique for the pulse-echo mode that uses an array of transmit-receive transducers. Because it is an application of the acoustic time reversal mirror, the irregular shape of the array and the aberration of the propagation medium are compensated and the selective focusing on targets is made possible. In this paper, we examined the application of this method to the underwater acoustics and the application to active sonar and communication are made possible. To clarify the relationship between the focusing effect of the DORT method and the sound propagation property in shallow water, we examined the selective focusing effect with respect to the propagation distance by using the cylindrical spread model without the sea surface and bottom and the Pekeris model, which is typical of shallow water models. There are few influences of the propagation distance on the focusing effect in shallow water model as a result, and it is shown that the focusing effect improves with the increase of the sound velocity of the bottom.
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