A TRANSIENT BOUNDARY ELEMENT

METHOD FOR ROOM ACOUSTICS

Jonathan A. Hargreaves, Trevor J. Cox
Acoustics Research Centre, University of Salford, M5 4WT
E-mail: j.a.hargreaves@salford.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: Being able to accurately predict acoustics is important to built environment

design. Currently prediction models that can deal with whole rooms are based on geometric or
statistical methods, and are only partially successful. Wave based models should be more
accurate, but computational time and storage limitations restrict their usefulness. One class of
wave models are Boundary Element Models (BEM).
Current BEM mostly calculate scattering for a single frequency. This provides valuable
insight to acousticians, but it is laborious to extract transient behaviour, as required for
Auralisation. Transient BEM provide these results directly, but have received scant attention
due to instability and high computational cost. This project aims to investigate, implement,
and enhance the current state of the art in transient BEM. Current progress is at the stage of
replicating published results, and the algorithm and some results are presented.

Keywords – Auralisation, Room Acoustics, Transient BEM

1 INTRODUCTION

Acoustics is about making the built environment sound better. In the context of
architecture this task can be roughly divided into two main areas: enhancement and isolation.
Room Acoustics is concerned with the design of spaces to create suitable acoustic
environments. This has traditionally been associated with enhancing performance spaces but
is now expanding to more mundane locations. For example, the same processes that are used
to treat auditoria may be applied to increase announcement intelligibility in a railway station
or reduce noise in a shopping mall. There are now regulations regarding speech intelligibility
in schools and on some of the acoustic parameters that influence this.
As population density increases and people live ever closer together in a 24-hour society,
noise control becomes a prominent issue. Unlike eyes, you cannot close your ears, so
external measures must be introduced to control noise. In order to maintain quality of life for
both individuals whose behaviour produces noise, and those for whom it is a nuisance,
acoustic isolation is a necessity. Current building regulations require that new buildings
satisfy acoustic isolation criteria.
It is substantially cheaper to incorporate such acoustic constraints at the design phase of a
building rather than attempting to retrofit solutions. Consequentially there is a demand for
simulation tools to predict parameters, such as those stipulated in the building regulations.
Additionally, architects and marketers make extensive use of visualisation tools to experience
an environment before it is constructed. Auralisation is the corresponding sonic tool,
allowing experience of an acoustic environment before it is constructed. This is now
beginning to become possible with modern software.
Another important use of simulation software is characterisation of acoustic components.
Acoustic components are items that an acoustician may specify to be installed in an
environment to correct an acoustic ill. They are often ‘passive’ components, meaning that
they do not contribute new sound energy, but absorb or scatter sound already present.
Measurement of these devices is difficult as their effect may be masked by the other sound in
the room. For example, if you closed your eyes it is easy to tell the difference between a hi-fi
(sound source) playing music and switched off. It is much harder to tell whether or not there
is a sofa (sound absorber) in the room. Special rooms called anechoic chambers are required
to make these measurements, and even then it is difficult and time consuming to achieve
adequate accuracy. By contrast, simulation software lends itself to these problems as the
incoming sound can be known exactly and its masking effects removed.

1.1 Current Commercial Simulation Models

The current commercially available simulation software packages are based on modelling
observed macroscopic properties of sound rather than the underlying physical effects. Many
of these models have similarities with the ray-tracing techniques used in visualisation; sound
energy is considered to be either a ray or particle bouncing around a room like a beam of
light. At high frequencies these approximations are reasonably accurate but at low
frequencies, where the wavelength of the sound waves is close to or greater than the
dimensions of the room, they become inaccurate. Even at high frequencies sound does not
reflect specularly, as light from a mirror, but is scattered according to the material and texture
of the surface. To account for this diffusion in these models, parameters are chosen that
control some type of statistical scattering process for each sound / surface interaction. These
parameters are not necessarily predictable from measurable material data and must be found
by trial and error, comparing simulated results with measured results. These ‘correct values’
for material parameters may also be affected by supposedly independent factors such as room
proportions (Lam 1996). Although these models are useful tools in the hands of an
experienced acoustician, they are not infallible and there is certainly room for improvement.

1.2 Wave Based Models

Wave based models are derived by modelling the underlying physical laws of how sound
travels through air. Within these models there are two main families: Finite Element Method
(FEM) and Boundary Element Method (BEM).
FEM works by dividing up the volume of air into many tiny volumes, called elements.
These must be small enough that, for the frequency range of sound we are investigating, the
pressure may be assumed constant (or some other simple distribution). Physical laws dictate
how the air in these elements interacts and from this, using a computer, the sound in the
whole room may be found. FEM is widely used in engineering, not least because it can also
be applied to vibrations travelling through solids such as walls. However in acoustics it has
some major drawbacks:

• All of the air volume must be modelled. This creates a very large number of
elements, and this number increases very rapidly with frequency or room size; if
either were doubled the number of elements required would multiply by eight.
• Free body scattering predications are difficult. In this case the air is considered to go
on forever, which prompts the question: where should one stop modelling the air?
Special edge elements are required to make it appear that the elements go on forever.

By comparison BEM does not suffer from these drawbacks. It applies known information
about the way sound travels through unobstructed air to convert a problem involving all the
air in a room to one involving just its interactions with surfaces. This greatly reduces the
number of elements required as only the surface has to be discretised, and this requirement
does not increase so fast with frequency or room size; if either were doubled the number of
elements required would multiply by four. It is also inherently suitable for free body
scattering predictions; the air goes on forever so there is simply no outer boundary.
 The BEM has two main disadvantages compared to FEM:
• The information about the way sound travels through air, on which it is based,
only applies when the air is still and homogeneous. It cannot be used where there
is turbulence or when pockets of air are of different temperatures. This limits its
use to mostly interior environments (technically this constraint also applies to the
current commercial software packages but there are cases of them being used for
external structures such as stadia).
• The interactions between BEM elements take longer to calculate than FEM
elements. A room must be of a certain size and subject to a certain frequency
before computational cost swings in the favour of BEM.

Figure 1: Free body scattering

1.3 Single Frequency BEM

The BEM currently used in acoustics are formulated to treat one frequency at a time. The
situation it models is one where a single pure tone is being, and has been and always will be,
produced by a source. If you have ever walked around a room where a single low frequency
tone is being played, you find that rather unintuitive it is not a consistent volume everywhere,
but has loud places and almost silent places. This single frequency volume information is
very useful to acousticians. It is also much quicker to calculate than a multi-frequency
(broadband) version as the underlying mathematical equations are simpler.
However, if the objective is to investigate the entire range of human hearing, then a great
many of these results are required. The results are not re-useable, for example having
calculated the sound field at 100Hz and 200Hz does not help calculate it at 300Hz, so this
takes great time. It is also the case that many subjective acoustic measures (data that
simulates the perception of the human ear) are not based on a single frequency but a range of
frequencies, so again many single frequency solutions must be calculated and averaged,
which takes time.
Auralisation has been mentioned as a means to experience the acoustics of an
environment before it is constructed. This requires transient multi-frequency information on
the sound field in a room; that is information for many frequencies when they haven’t been
going on forever. This information may be recovered from a collection of single frequency
solutions, but a great number are needed. If Auralisation is the ultimate goal, it may be more
efficient to solve the more complex broadband mathematical equations once than the single
frequency equations many times. This is the motivation for this project.
2 TRANSIENT BEM

The transient BEM bears strong similarities to the single frequency BEM but it does not
consider that a sound has and will be the same forever; instead it considers it to be a transient
phenomenon. The surface that forms the boundary between the air and another material is
still discretised into elements, but time is now discretised too as in digital recording media
such as CD. The transient BEM algorithm has two phases: Element Interaction Evaluation
and Marching On in Time (MOT).

2.1 Element Interaction Evaluation

The interaction between a pair of elements is dependent on how far away they are from
each other; distant elements interact less strongly than close elements. Sound travels with a
constant speed so the further a pair of elements are apart, the longer the sound travelling
between them is delayed. When evaluating interaction, one element is considered the source
of sound and the other is considered the observer. The observer element simply has an
observation point in the centre, but the source element is considered to transmit sound from
its entire surface. The interaction between the two elements is thus the sum of the interaction
of all points on the source element with the observation point on the observer element. This
summing process is called numerical integration. It is worth noting that if the roles of the
elements are swapped the result is not necessarily the same, though probably similar.

Observer element Source element

Figure 2. Interaction of elements

Time is discretised into time-steps and when evaluating element interactions, delay
between elements must be considered. This is addressed by imagining an observation time
window: the observer element observes at its centre for only a single time-step. The
immediate interaction is what the observer sees around itself during the current time-step.
Geometrically this is any part of a surface that lies within a sphere radius c (speed of sound)
multiplied by ∆t (the time-step length in seconds). This is illustrated in figure 3. It is very
critical to evaluate this immediate interaction accurately as the observer and source points
will be very close together and hence interact strongly. An element will interact with itself
and this must be accurately evaluated here also.

Radius = c∆ t

Figure 3: Immediate self-interaction viewed from above element

It is also necessary to calculate non-immediate interaction: the retarded interactions. This

is what the observer can see of some past time-step, times between Now - L∆t and Now –
(L+1)∆t, where L is an integer. Geometrically this is any part of a surface that lies between
an inner spherical shell of radius Lc∆t, and an outer shell of radius (L+1)c∆t. This is
illustrated in figure 4. The area of the source element that contributes to the retarded
interaction is often an awkward shape and this makes accurate evaluation of the retarded
interaction complicated.

delay = R c
R
L ∆ t ≤ delay ≤ (L + 1)∆ t

Figure 4: Retarded Interaction viewed from above element

Interaction is calculated between all pairs of elements for all retarded time-steps that
contain some part of the surface. If there are Ns elements and the maximum distance between
any two points on the surface is Rmax, then there are Ns2Rmax/c∆t element interactions to
evaluate. The time taken to evaluate each interaction is roughly constant except where it is
zero and the total time taken to perform this section of the algorithm is proportional to the
number of elements squared.

2.2 Marching On in Time (MOT)

The phenomenon of sound is causal and the structure of the MOT algorithm reflects this.
Pressure is calculated for each surface element at each time-step, by adding up pressures of
other elements and sources at previous time-steps according to the now known interaction
coefficients. This process is illustrated by figure 5. As everything is calculated based on past
data there has to be known initial conditions before the source starts to produce sound. This
is normally taken to be silence.

Figure 5: Marching On in Time

For each time-step Ns2
element interactions must be summed for Rmax/c∆t retarded
influences. The duration of the model is T seconds so this all has to happen T/∆t times.
Assuming the duration and the scattering object are constant, the time taken to perform this
section of the algorithm is proportional to number of elements divided by time-step length all
squared. Usually the number of elements is proportional to the square of, and the time-step
inversely proportional to, the maximum frequency of the incoming sound. Hence the total
time taken to perform the algorithm is proportional to maxixmum frequency to the power six.
There exist novel schemes (Ergin 1999, 2000) to accelerate this process but these are not
discussed in this paper.

2.3 Validation

A numerical model is no use unless it reflects real life, so it must be validated somehow.
It is important to understand that any numerical model, even a wave based one, is only an
approximation to the real solution. In the model described in this paper the biggest
approximation is that surface pressure is constant for each surface element over a time-step.
There are also assumptions underlying the wave equations, such as that the air is still, that
could affect the accuracy relative to real world data.
The MOT algorithm has an additional problem. It belongs to the class of iterative
algorithms, ones where each result is based on the previous. It is important to know whether
or not approximation errors accumulate with time, as this will dictate whether the model
remains accurate as time marches on. A lack of such stability has been the significant reason
in the lack of commercial and research interest in transient BEM until recently. The results
presented in this paper use the method of Ergin (1999) to overcome these stability issues.
As has been previously mentioned, it is difficult to accurately measure the free body
scattering problems that are the primary application. Transient data is extremely scarce in
comparison to single frequency data (where techniques may be used to suppress measurement
noise) so it is not possible to directly verify this model. Single frequency BEM have been
verified against the more available single frequency data (D’Antonio & Cox 1998). In the
same way that a transient solution may be constructed from many single frequency solutions,
many single frequency solutions may be extracted from one transient solution. These are
then compared to the results of a conventional, verified single-frequency BEM to verify the
transient BEM.

2.4 History

The first MOT scheme to solve transient scattering was by Friedman and Shaw in 1962.
This paper specifically dealt with cylindrical objects and was followed by the publication of
similar papers on other specific geometries, as recent as Neilson et al (1978) concerned with
incoming shock waves.
Mitzner (1967) produced the first paper to deal with surface meshing of arbitrary objects.
Kawai and Terai (1990) produced a model to deal with thin surfaces. Bluck and Walker
(1996) adapted the MOT algorithm to be implicit (properly consider immediate interaction)
and used the more accurate surface element approximations more often seen in FEM. Ergin
(1999) took this implicit MOT and built arguments of stability inspired by the single
frequency work of Burton and Miller (1971).
The work of Ding, Forestier and Ha-Duong (1989) and Ha-Duong, Ludwig and Terrasse
(2003) is more mathematically orientated and runs parallel culminating in Ha-Duong’s 2003
survey article.

3 RESULTS
 The following results are calculated using an algorithm identical to Ergin (1999) except
that a more accurate retarded interaction numerical integration scheme is used. This
algorithm is the same as the one described in the previous section except that surface pressure
during a time-step is not considered constant. Instead it is considered to be a given piecewise
polynomial multiplied by a scalar.
The following results are produced by a scattering model of a two-metre diameter hard
sphere, very similar to a validation model used by Ergin in his 1999 paper. The sphere is
discretised into 2208 triangular surface elements. The sound source is a point source (omni-
directional) 100 meters from the sphere. The layout is shown in figure 6.

100m centre
to centre
point
source

Figure 6: Sphere scattering model

The results shown are a polar plot of a cross-section through the sphere. This has been
achieved by selecting surface elements so that they form a ring that passes through the line
from the centre of the sphere to the source. The scattering is still calculated as if all the
elements were there, but only those in the ring are shown.

100m centre
angle
to centre
point
source

Figure 7: Cross-section through sphere

The quantity being displayed is called ‘velocity potential’. It is closely related to pressure
and may be interpreted in the same way; as the amount of sound reflected from a surface
element. Each element in the ring is a marker on figure 8; the magnitude of the velocity
potential is its radius and the angle is as shown in figure 7. The frequency is 200Hz.
90
0.002
120 60

0.0015

150 0.001 30

0.0005

180 0

210 330

FDBEM
CFIETDBEM
240 300

270

Figure 8: Cross-section through scattering by a sphere

The correlation between the FDBEM and the CFIETDBEM is currently poor. However,
the order of magnitude of the results is very similar; this has taken a long time to achieve and
is encouraging. It is hoped that as work progresses and the algorithm is refined the
CFIETDBEM results will converge to match the FDBEM results.

4 CONCLUSIONS

A transient boundary element method (TBEM) has been presented. Simulation models
are required by the acoustics community to predict the acoustic properties of the built
environment before it is constructed. Current models are based on observed phenomena
rather than underlying physical principles and are of limited use. Wave-based models are
more accurate but costly in computation time. Current wave-based models are hence
restricted to single frequency analysis.
The TBEM has a history nearly as long as its single frequency counterpart, but is not
widely used. This is because it has stability issues and high computational cost, but these
have been addressed by recent work. The structure of the TBEM algorithm has been
explained. Current results have been presented that, whilst not validating the TBEM, are
encouraging.

5 REFERENCES

Bluck, M. J. and Walker, S. P., 1996, Analysis of three-dimensional transient acoustic wave
propagation using the boundary integral equation method, Int.J.Numer.Meth.Engng, 39,
pp1419-1431

Burton, A. J. and Miller, G. F., 1971, The application of integral equation methods to the
numerical solution of some exterior boundary-value problems, Proc.R.Soc.London, Ser A
323, pp201-210

D’Antonio, P. and Cox, T. J., 1998, Two Decades of Room Diffusors. Part 2: Measurement,
prediction and characterisation, J.Audio.Eng.Soc. 46(12), pp1075-1091.

Ding, Y., Forestier, A. and Ha-Duong, T., 1989, A Galerkin scheme for the time domain
integral equation of acoustic scattering from a hard surface, J.Acoust.Soc.Am. 86(4), pp
1566-1572.

Ergin, A. A., Shanker, B. and Michielssen, E., 1999, Analysis of transient wave scattering
from rigid bodies using a Burton-Miller approach, J.Acoust.Soc.Am. 106(5), pp2396-
2404.

Ergin, A. A., Shanker, B. and Michielssen, E., 1999, Fast transient analysis of acoustic wave
scattering from rigid bodies using a two-level plane wave time domain algorithm,
J.Acoust.Soc.Am. 106(5), pp2405-2416.

Ergin, A. A., Shanker, B. and Michielssen, E., 1999, Fast transient analysis of acoustic wave
scattering from rigid bodies using the multilevel plane wave time domain algorithm,
J.Acoust.Soc.Am. 107(3), pp1168-1178.

Friedman, M. B. and Shaw, R., 1962 Diffraction of pulses by cylindrical obstacles of

arbitrary cross section, J.Appl.Mech. 29, pp40-46.

Ha-Duong, T., 2003, On Retarded Potential Boundary Integral Equations and their
Discretisation, Lecture Notes In Computational Science and Engineering, Springer, Vol
31, pp301-336

Ha-Duong, T., Ludwig, B. and Terrasse, I., 2003, A Galerkin BEM for transient acoustic
scattering by an absorbing obstacle, Int.J.Numer.Meth.Engng, 57, pp1845-1882

Kawai, Y. and Terai, T., 1990, A numerical method for the calculation of transient acoustic
scattering from think rigid plates, J.Sound.Vib. 141(1), pp83-96.

Lam, Y. W., 1996, A comparison of three diffuse reflection modelling methods used in room
acoustics computer models, J.Acoust.Soc.Am. 100(4), pp2181-2192.

Mitzner, K. M., 1967, Numerical solution for transient scattering from a hard surface of
arbitrary shape – retarded potential technique, J.Acoust.Soc.Am. 42(2), pp 391-397.
Neilson, H. C., Lu, Y. P. and Wang, Y. F., 1978, Transient scattering by arbitrary
axisymmetric surfaces, J.Acoust.Soc.Am. 63(6), pp1719-1726.