An axisymmetric boundary element formulation of sound wave propagation in fluids including viscous and thermal losses

The formulation presented in this paper is based on the Boundary Element Method (BEM) and implements Kirchhoff’s decomposition into viscous, thermal and acoustic components, which can be treated independently everywhere in the domain except on the boundaries. The acoustic variables with losses are solved using extended boundary conditions that account for: i) negligible temperature fluctuations at the boundary, and ii) normal and tangential matching of the boundary’s particle velocity. The proposed model does not require constructing a special mesh for the viscous and thermal boundary layers as is the case with the existing Finite Element Method (FEM) implementations with losses. The suitability of this approach is demonstrated using an axisymmetrical BEM and two test cases where the numerical results are compared with analytical solutions.