Georgios Lilis

Distributed Wave Field Synthesis: a Hybrid Space-time Finite Element Method for Wave Field Reproduction Georgios Lilis

Many problems in geophysics, acoustics, elasticity theory, cancer treatment, food process control and electrodynamics involve study of methods for wave field reproduction in some form or another. In the present work, wave field reproduction problems are analysed as static problems, using finite element methods and treating time as an additional spatial dimension. It is shown that a fully finite element-based scheme is a very natural and effective way to solve such problems. As a result, distributed wave field synthesis (DWFS) is introduced as a wave field reproduction method in the context of two-dimensional problems. Incorporation of any geometric or material non- linearities is shown to be straightforward. This has significant implications for problems in geophysics or biological media, where material inhomogeneities are quite prevalent. Numerical results are presented for several problems referring to media with material inhomogeneities and predefined absorption profiles. DWFS can be extended to three-dimensional problems involving media with anisotropic properties in a relatively straightforward manner.