Stationary variational expressions for radiated and scattered acoustic power and related quantities

The construction of stationary expressions for quantities of physical interest such as radiated power and target strength is discussed broadly for acoustic problems involving radiation or scattering from finite objects of arbitrary shape. The Kirchhoff-Helmholtz integral corollaries of the wave equation, which express acoustic pressure at either interior or exterior points in terms of pressure and its normal derivative over any closed surface, yield for both interior and exterior problems two mathematically dissimilar but related functional relations between surface field quantities. One of these is the better known surface Helmholtz integral equation; the other is a differential-integral relation which involves the tangential derivatives of pressure on the surface. The four linear operators involved in these functional relations are studied and it is found that two are self-adjoint, while the other two are an adjoint pair. A general technique for constructing variational expressions recently developed by Gerjuoy et al. [28] is adapted to acoustic radiation and scattering problems with the functional relations taken as the primary governing relations. Included examples are stationary expressions for the radiated power when either the normal velocity or the pressure are specified on the surface (the other quantity being unknown) and the target strength for scattering from a rigid object. The adjoint relations allow simple physical interpretations for the Lagrange multipliers that arise in the theory, such that the guesses for good trial functions can take advantage of existing physical insight. It is demonstrated with a specific example (transversely vibrating disk) that the resulting estimate for radiated power is substantially more accurate than that of the trial function for surface pressure which was inserted into the stationary expression.