Numerical study of three-dimensional sound reflection from corrugated surface waves

摘要

When a sound wave propagates in a water medium bounded by a smooth surface wave, reflection from a wave crest can lead to focusing and result in rapid variation of the received waveform as the surface wave moves [Tindle, Deane, and Preisig, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125, 66-72 (2009)]. In prior work, propagation paths have been constrained to be in a plane parallel to the direction of corrugated surface waves, i.e., a two-dimensional (2-D) propagation problem. In this paper, the azimuthal dependence of sound propagation as a three-dimensional (3-D) problem is investigated using an efficient, time-domain Helmholtz-Kirchhoff integral formulation. When the source and receiver are in the plane orthogonal to the surface wave direction, the surface wave curvature vanishes in conventional 2-D treatments and the flat surface simply moves up and down, resulting in minimal temporal variation of the reflected signal intensity. On the other hand, the 3-D propagation analysis reveals that a focusing phenomenon occurs in the reflected signal due to the surface wave curvature formed along the orthogonal plane, i.e., out-of-plane scattering.