Fast Evaluation of Sound Radiation by Vibrating Structures with ACIRAN/AR

The numerical analysis of sound radiation by vibrating structure is a well known and mature technology used in many industries. Accurate methods based on the boundary or finite element method have been successfully developed over the last two decades and are now available in standard CAE tools. These methods are however known to require significant computational resources which, furthermore, very quickly increase with the frequency of interest. The low speed of most current methods is a main obstacle for a systematic use of acoustic CAE in industrial design processes. In this paper we are going to present a set of innovative techniques that significantly speed-up the calculation of acoustic radiation indicators (acoustic pressure, velocity, intensity and power; contribution vectors). The modeling is based on the well known combination of finite elements and infinite elements but also combines the following ingredients to obtain a very high performance: o a multi-frontal massively parallel sparse direct solver; o a multi-frequency solver based on the Krylov method; o the use of pellicular acoustic modes as a vector basis for representing acoustic excitations; o the numerical evaluation of Green functions related to the specific geometry of the problem under investigation. All these ingredients are embedded in the ACTRAN/AR CAE tool which provides unprecedented performance for acoustic radiation analysis. The method will be demonstrated on several applications taken from various industries.