A Moving Zonal Method in the Time-Domain Simulation for Acoustic Propagation

Conventional time-domain schemes have limited capability in modeling long-range acoustic propagation because of the vast computer resources needed to cover the entire region of interest with a computational domain. Many of the long-range acoustic propagation problems need to consider propagation distances of hundreds or thousands of meters. It is thus very difficult to maintain adequate grid resolution for such a large computational domain, even with the state-of-the-art capacity in computer memory and computing speed. In order to overcome this barrier, a moving zonal-domain approach is developed. This concept uses a moving computational domain that follows an acoustic wave. The size and interval of motion of the domain are problem dependent. In this paper, an Euler-type moving domain in a stationary coordinate frame is first tested. Size effects and boundary conditions for the moving domain are considered. The results are compared and verified with both analytical solutions and results from the non-zonal domain. Issues of using the moving zonal-domain with perfectly-matched layers for the free-space boundary are also discussed.