Comparison between different finite element/boundary formulations for modeling acoustic radiation in fluids

Different possibilities are investigated in this paper to model acoustic radiation in fluids excited by piezoelectric transducers. Bidimensional collocations formulations (simple or symmetric) as well as variational principles have been tested and compared. Since the variational approach was found to be the most efficient one, it has been used to develop a mixed 2D finite element/boundary element programme to simulate acoustic pressure radiation in fluids generated by ultrasound piezoelectric transducers. This development has been extended to take into account 1D periodicity in 2D structures. A typical application of the code is shown to illustrate the proposed work.