Distributed Wave Field Synthesis

Many problems in geophysics, acoustics,
elasticity theory, cancer treatment, food process
control and electrodynamics involve study of methods
for wave field reproduction in some form or another.
In the present work, wave field reproduction
problems are analysed as static problems, using
finite element methods and treating time as an
additional spatial dimension. It is shown that a
fully finite element-based scheme is a very natural
and effective way to solve such problems.

As a result, distributed wave field synthesis
(DWFS) is introduced as a wave field reproduction
method in the context of two-dimensional problems.
Incorporation of any geometric or material non-
linearities is shown to be straightforward. This
has significant implications for problems in
geophysics or biological media, where material
inhomogeneities are quite prevalent. Numerical
results are presented for several problems referring
to media with material inhomogeneities and
predefined absorption profiles. DWFS can be extended
to three-dimensional problems involving media with
anisotropic properties in a relatively
straightforward manner.