An efficient time domain solver for the acoustic wave equation

An efficient numerical solver for time domain solution of the wave equation for the purpose of propagation in small and large acoustic spaces is presented. It is based on the adaptive rectangular decomposition technique that subdivides a space into rectangular partitions and within each partition utilizes the analytical solution of the wave equation for spatially invariant speed of sound. This technique allows numerical computations in kilohertz range for auralization and visualization purposes. This can help engineers to quickly locate geometric features responsible for acoustical defects in practical engineering applications like noise control. It is demonstrated that by carefully mapping all the components of the technique on the GPU architecture, significant improvement in performance can be achieved while maintaining accuracy comparable to a high-order finite difference time domain (FDTD) solver. It is an order of magnitude faster than corresponding CPU-based solver and three orders of magnitude faster than the CPU-based FDTD solver. This technique can perform a 1 s long simulation on complex-shaped 3D scenes of air volume 7500 cu m till 1650 Hz within 18 min on a desktop machine. The ideal session for this work is “Computational Acoustics”.