Coupling Boundary Elements to a Raytracing Procedure using the Singular Indirect Method

The coupling of Boundary Elements and a raytracing procedure is presented here. Such a hybrid method is best suited to the study of realistic outdoor sound propagation problems: The noise often acts in a domain where many objects like buildings or sound insulation walls scatter the sound. Thus, diffraction has to be taken into account. BEM is well suited. To study the effects of this noise on a sound receiver far away, raytracing may be preferable for such application, because refraction can be implemented more easily. Hence, a Boundary Element Analysis is performed in noisy nearfield regions, a raytracing procedure at a larger distance from the sound sources. First, the direct Boundary Element algorithm is applied to determine the sound pressure at interface points. Second, a singular indirect Boundary Element formulation is used to find intensities of point sources on the same interface which produce the previously determined sound pressure. Finally, these sound intensities are the input data for the raytracing procedure. (© 2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)