Ansys has added an abundance of Acoustics Simulation features in the Workbench environment over the releases starting from Rel. 15.0. In addition to solver enhancements by way of adding a higher order acoustics element several pre and post processing features are exposed in Workbench. This technical note is intended to give a brief exposure of the basic acoustic fluid-structure simulation features available using simple examples.
Enclosed Domain Acoustics:
Sound pressure waves emanating from a sound source, such as a vibrating cone of an audio system speaker cone for example, travels outbound till it arrives at the boundary and gets reflected back to within the enclosed domain. The outgoing and reflected wave then interact and produce a standing wave pattern inside the enclosure. An example of enclosed domain acoustics would be simulation of an audio system speaker placed inside an auditorium.
Unbounded Domain Acoustics:
An example of unbounded domain acoustics would be; simulation of airplane jet noise where the sound pressure wave travels farther beyond the computational domain modeled around the source. So, at the boundary of the computational domain we place a nonreflecting (absorbing) boundary that would enforce both p->0 and dp/dn ->0 as r->infinity (Sommerfeld nonreflecting boundary condition).