A Boundary Element Method for Acoustic Problems in Relative Motion Between Source and Fluid

To calculate the acoustic problems of relative uniform motion between the acoustic source and the fluid, we propose a boundary element method (BEM) strategy that can calculate various forms of relative uniform motion in subsonic conditions in a unified framework and is simple to implement. The acceleration algorithm for the BEM, like the fast multipole method (FMM), in the relative motionless state between the source and the fluid can be directly used without major modifications to the program. We propose a two-step transformation method to unify the wave equations of different relative motion forms into the classical form. In the first step, we transform the wave equations for various forms of relative motion into the equation where the convective terms are present only in the source part. Then, in the second step, we propose an acoustic-analogy Lorentz (a-a Lorentz) transformation to apply Lorentz covariance further to eliminate the convection term and establish the wave equation with classical form in a-a Lorentz space. We implement the boundary integration in the transformed a-a Lorentz space and derive a transformation method to transform discretized geometry and boundary conditions in the original space to the a-a Lorentz space. The problem that the boundary conditions are difficult to apply when solving the boundary integral equation (BIE) after the time-space coordinate transformation is solved. Numerical validations for the proposed method are performed by comparing with analytical results over a wide range of relative velocities. The results show that the proposed method can efficiently compute such problems with high accuracy and concise formulation.