On the validity of some new acoustic scattering approximations

Abstract

Two new approximations for predicting the elastic scattering of plane acoustic waves by a weak scatterer are proposed. The approximations have been obtained by drawing an analogy between acoustic and light scattering problems. The validity of these approximations has been examined numerically for the exactly soluble case of scattering by a homogeneous sphere. Results show that for small angle scattering the proposed approximations have a considerably larger domain of validity in comparison to the extensively used Born approximation.