Fast computation of time-dependent acoustic fields

A method for the fast evaluation of time-dependent acoustic fields from complex sources is presented. The technique is based on a fast integration method for the boundary integral arising in a Kirchhoff formulation and requires a small, and roughly constant, computation time to compute a transient signal, at the expense of a pre-processing stage. In the calculations in this paper, based on test cases for a single rotor, a counter-rotating open rotor, and a broadband volume source, it is found that transient field calculations require an order of magnitude less computational time for the field from an array of 16 384 sources, a computational advantage that increases with source number.