FINITE ELEMENT MODELLING OF RADIATING WAVES IN IMMERSED WEDGES

Abstract The propagation of acoustic waves in immersed waveguides has been previously studied with the help of the finite element method, by using the ATILA code (A. C. Hladky-Hennon et al ., 1997 JSV 200 , 519–530). In that paper, the study of the propagating modes along immersed rectilinear wedges was presented, and the theoretical results obtained for Plexiglas wedges agreed well with the experiments. Nevertheless, due to the theoretical formulation, the method was not able to study radiating modes. Thus, the present paper presents a modification of the previous method, with a view to finding either propagating modes or radiating modes. First the formalism is presented, where an original procedure is used to solve the finite element system. Then, wedges, the top angle of which varies, are studied and the finite element results for the wedge wave velocity are compared to experiments, for brass and duralumin samples.