Acoustic scattering for 3D multi-directional periodic structures using the boundary element method.

An efficient boundary element formulation is proposed to solve three-dimensional exterior acoustic scattering problems with multi-directional periodicity. The multi-directional periodic acoustic problem is represented as a multilevel block Toeplitz matrix. By exploiting the Toeplitz structure, the computational time and storage requirements to construct and to solve the linear system of equations arising from the boundary element formulation are significantly reduced. The generalized minimal residual method is implemented to solve the linear system of equations. To efficiently calculate the matrix-vector product in the iterative algorithm, the original matrix is embedded into a multilevel block circulant matrix. A multi-dimensional discrete Fourier transform is then employed to accelerate the matrix-vector product. The proposed approach is applicable to a periodic acoustic problem for any arbitrary shape of the structure in both full space and half space. Two case studies involving sonic crystal barriers are presented. In the first case study, a sonic crystal barrier comprising rigid cylindrical scatterers is modeled. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique, periodicity in one, two, or three directions is examined. In the second case study, the acoustic performance of a sonic crystal barrier with locally resonant C-shaped scatterers is studied.