Numerical analysis of large-scale sound fields using iterative methods part II: Application of Krylov subspace methods to finite element analysis

Krylov subspace iterative solvers are applied to large-scale finite element sound-field analyses of architectural rooms. First, convergence behaviors are compared among four iterative solvers. Results show that the Conjugate Orthogonal Conjugate Gradient (COCG) method offers the best characteristics for finite-element (FE) analysis from the viewpoint of robustness of convergence and computation time. Two investigations to reduce the computation time of the COCG method were carried out. Results show the following. (1) The mean residual of sound pressure levels between COCG method and direct method is less than 0.1 dB if the convergence criterion is set to 10(-4) and the maximum residual of those between COCG method and direct method is less than 0.2 dB if the convergence criterion is set to 10(-6). (2) The computation time of the COCG method with diagonal preconditioning is about 30% shorter than that of COCG method without preconditioning. Finally, sound pressure level distributions obtained using the authors' FEM are compared to those obtained using fast multipole BEM (FMBEM) and measurements.