Transient analyses of underwater acoustic propagation with the modified meshfree radial point interpolation method and newmark time integration techniques

Underwater acoustic propagation plays a very important role in underwater communication and ocean engineering field. The radial point interpolation method (RPIM) is an effective numerical approach to solve underwater acoustic propagations though considerable numerical errors can always be caused due to the discontinuously differentiable nodal interpolation function in one integration cell. The origin of this numerical error primarily comes from the mismatch between the background integration cell and the nodal interpolation function support. To address this issue, a modified meshfree RPIM is developed in this work for transient analyses of underwater acoustic propagations. In the proposed modified RPIM, the construction of the interpolation function supports are dependent on the integration cells. In consequence, in one background cell all the quadrature points share one mutual support domain and the continuously differentiable interpolation functions can be obtained. Therefore, the numerical integration errors can be evidently decreased and the related numerical dispersion effects in wave analysis can be largely suppressed. Owing to the adequately small spatial dispersion errors from the proposed modified RPIM, it is observed that the modified RPIM with the Newmark time domain discretization scheme can monotonically improve the solution precision by directly reducing the temporal discretization interval. This property makes the modified RPIM clearly outperform the original RPIM and is especially suitable for handling very complex underwater acoustic propagations.