On the diffuse field reciprocity relationship and vibrational energy variance in a random subsystem at high frequencies

A recent paper has shown that under certain conditions the cross-spectral matrix of the forces exerted by a vibrational or acoustic wave field on its surrounding boundaries can be expressed in terms of (i) the energy of the wave field, and (ii) the direct field dynamic stiffness matrix of the boundary. This "diffuse field reciprocity relation" was derived using wave mechanics, and it is not immediately clear how the required wave field properties translate to conditions on the vibrational modes of the system or the applied forcing. This issue is addressed here by deriving an extended version of the reciprocity relation using modal methods, and the conditions required for the extended version to reduce to the existing relation are delineated. It is shown that the existing diffuse field reciprocity relation leads to an anomalous result when used to predict the energy variance of a subsystem, and that this anomaly is resolved by using the present extended version of the relation. A supplementary result arising from the analysis is that for systems with a sufficient degree of randomness the ensemble average of the dynamic stiffness matrix of a random subsystem is equal to the inverse of the ensemble average of the receptance matrix.