A decomposition scheme for acoustic obstacle scattering in a multilayered medium

We consider the acoustic wave scattering by an impenetrable obstacle embedded in a multilayered background medium, which is modelled by a linear system constituted by the Helmholtz equations with different wave numbers and the transmission conditions across the interfaces. The aim of this article is to construct an efficient computing scheme for the scattered waves for this complex scattering process, with a rigorous mathematical analysis. First, we construct a set of functions by a series of coupled transmission problems, which are proven to be well-defined. Then, the solution to our complex scattering in each layer is decomposed as the summation in terms of these functions, which are essentially the contributions from two interfaces enclosing this layer. These contributions physically correspond to the scattered fields for simple scattering problems, which do not involve the multiple scattering and are coupled via the boundary conditions. Finally, we propose an iteration scheme to compute the wave field in each layer decoupling the multiple scattering effects, with the advantage that only the solvers for the well-known transmission problems and an obstacle scattering problem in a homogeneous background medium are applied. The convergence property of this iteration scheme is proven.