FINITE DIFFERENCE TIME DOMAIN METHOD AS

A VALIDATION TOOL OF TRANSMISSION LOSS CALCULATION

FOR LAYERED UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC ENVIRONMENTS

Erkul BAŞARAN(a,b), Deniz BÖLÜKBAŞ(b),

Sevgi AKGÜN(b), Serkan AKSOY(a,b)

(a)
Gebze Institute of Technology, Department of Electronics Engineering, 41400, Gebze, Kocaeli, TURKEY
(b)
The Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey, Marmara Research Center, TURKEY
erkul@gyte.edu.tr, deniz.bolukbas@bte.mam.gov.tr, sevgi.akgun@bte.mam.gov.tr, saksoy@gyte.edu.tr

ABSTRACT

In this work, the results are presented for the transmission loss calculations of a propagating
acoustic wave in a layered underwater acoustic enviroments by Finite Difference Time
Domain (FDTD) method. In the FDTD method, the sea environments are modeled as one
layered medium and two layered (fluid-fluid and fluid-solid) medium. The sea surface and the
sea bottom are considered to be planar surfaces. The discritized acoustic wave equations
are used in the algorithm of the FDTD method and Perfectly Matched Layer absorbing
boundary condition is applied in order to model infinite problem space. The FDTD solutions
are validated with the results of KRAKEN program or vice versa.

Keywords: Acoustic Wave, Transmission Loss, Finite Difference Time Domain.

1. INTRODUCTION
The underwater acoustic wave propagation problem should be investigated in order
to understand the acoustic wave propagation properties for determining the behavior of the
attenuation for the sound intensity in the sea since it is one of the important issues in various
areas of acoustics especially in sonar performance prediction for military applications. The
attenuation of the sound intensity is commonly characterized by the Transmission Loss (TL)
which is widely used to predict the probability of target detection in the naval applications.
Therefore, the calculation of the TL in the underwater environment is an important problem in
the acoustic research. There are lots of analytical and numerical methods for the calculation
of the TL. While the analytical methods can generally be applied to solve the canonical
problems, the numerical methods have the advantage for the evaluation of the acoustic wave
propagation in the complex underwater environments but have the disadvantage especially
for the large scale problems of the computer requirements. Moreover the numerical time
domain methods have extra advantages because of the solution capabilities for the wide
band sources in a single run. Thus if a validation tool having the ability to solve a wide class
of problems is required, the numerical time domain methods are even the most advisable. In
this sense, one of the most widely used time domain numerical method is Finite Difference
Time Domain (FDTD) which is a full wave method based on the solutions of fundamental
differential equations [1], also in acoustics. In this work, it is aimed to develop a full wave
FDTD solver to be used as a validation tool for the TL calculations in the complex sea
environments. For this aim, one layer, fluid–fluid and fluid–solid two layered underwater
acoustic environments with the monochromatic point source excitation are investigated by
using the FDTD method. The results are compared with the results of the KRAKEN program
based on Normal Mode method in frequency domain [3].
2. THEORY
Two fundamental acoustic equations are numerically solved by using the FDTD
method. The sea surface is modeled as a pressure release boundary with Dirichlet boundary
condition. The sea bottom in fluid - fluid two layered case is modeled as a lossless
penetrable medium and in fluid - solid two layered case as a lossy penetrable medium. All
the other boundaries of the sea environments are modeled as an infinite region by using the
Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) absorbing boundary condition in FDTD algorithm [2].
The basic Newton’s law of motion

∂v(r, t )
ρ (r ) = −∇u (r, t ) (1)
∂t

and the equation of the continuity

∂u (r, t )
+ γ (r )c 2 (r )u (r, t ) = − ρ (r )c 2 (r )∇ ⋅ v(r, t ) (2)
∂t

are used for the modeling of the problem where u (r, t ) is the spatial and the time dependent
acoustic pressure field (N/m2), v (r, t ) is the particle velocity (m/s), ρ (r ) is the density
(kg/m3), γ (r ) is the absorption coefficient, c(r ) is the sound speed (m/s) and the Nabla
operator ∇ is applied in two dimensional Cartesian coordinate system. The γ (r ) is related
to the attenuation coefficient α (r, ω ) with the complex wave number k (r, ω ) as

k (r, ω ) = (ω 2 / c 2 + iωγ )
−1/ 2
= ω / c′(r, ω ) + iα (r, ω ) (3)

where c′(r, ω ) is the dispersive wave velocity [2].

Equations (1) and (2) are discritized in time and space to obtain the update equations
for the FDTD algorithm and arranged to be solved recursively in time with the proper initial
and the boundary conditions for the FDTD [1]. To obtain the variation of the TL according to
the range, first of all, the observation points are selected along a line corresponding the
FDTD grids which are in the same depth with the point source that is located in the middle of
the sea depth. Then, the saved temporal acoustic pressures along the observation points are
transformed to the frequency domain by applying Fast Fourier Transform. Thus the TL
values are obtained by plotting the absolute values of the calculated frequency domain
pressure values along the observation line.

3. NUMERICAL RESULTS
In the FDTD algorithm, the unit space size ∆x = λ / 20 and ∆y = λ / 20 are chosen (λ is
the wavelength) in the construction of the spatial FDTD grids for evaluation of the
geometrical problem details, properly. Accordingly, the unit time increments ∆t value is
determined by Courant stability condition [1].
The real physical dimensions of the problem space are 60 m x 1000 m of which
acoustical dimensions are 2.4 λ x 40 λ for 60 Hz frequency. The total cell numbers are 48 x
800, the spatial unit step sizes are ∆x = ∆y = 1.25 m, the unit time step is ∆t = 4.3301x10-4 s
and the total number of the time steps is 30000. For all of the examples given in the following
chapter, f is the frequency, h is the depth, r is the range, c is the sound velocity, ρ is the
density, α is the attenuation coefficient, all the observation lines of the TL are on the middle
point of the first depth value and the indices 1 and 2 show the sea column and the sea
bottom media. The bottom layer is in 20 m of depth for the fluid-fluid and 40 m depth for the
fluid-solid media and all of the boundaries except pressure-release sea surface are modeled
by PML absorbing boundary condition. Three scenarios and related sub-scenarios are
selected for the validation process and the FDTD results are validated by the results of
KRAKEN program or vice versa.

3.1 One Layered Medium

In this section, three scenarios of different frequencies, depths and sound velocities in
one layered medium are investigated and shown in Fig.1-2-3. Excellent agreement between
the results of the FDTD and the KRAKEN program is found.

Figure 1. f=80 Hz, h=60 m, c=1500 m/s, ρ=1000 kg/m3.

Figure 2. f=60 Hz, h=80 m, c=1500 m/s, ρ=1000 kg/m3.

 Figure 3. f=60 Hz, h=60 m, c=1600 m/s, ρ=1000 kg/m3.

3.2 Fluid-Fluid Medium

In this section, three scenarios of different frequencies, velocities and densities in
fluid-fluid medium are investigated and shown in Fig. 4-5-6. Excellent agreement between
the results of FDTD and the KRAKEN program is observed.

Figure 4. f=120 Hz, h=60 m, c1=1500 m/s, c2=2000 m/s, ρ1=1000 kg/m3, ρ2=2000 kg/m3.

Figure 5. f=60 Hz, h=60 m, c1=1500 m/s, c2=2000 m/s, ρ1=1000 kg/m3, ρ2=2000 kg/m3.
 Figure 6. f=60 Hz, h=60 m, c1=1500 m/s, c2=2300 m/s, ρ1=1000 kg/m3, ρ2=1500 kg/m3.

3.3 Fluid-Solid Medium

In this section, TL for three different scenarios of different frequencies, velocities,
densities and attenuations in the fluid-solid medium are shown in Fig.7-8-9. Excellent
agreement between the results of FDTD and the KRAKEN program is found.

Figure 7. f=180 Hz, h=60 m, c1=1500 m/s, c2=2000 m/s,

ρ1=1000 kg/m3, ρ2=2000 kg/m3, α2=0.005 dB/m.

Figure 8. f=60 Hz, h=60 m, c1=1500 m/s, c2=2300 m/s,

ρ1=1000 kg/m3, ρ2=2000 kg/m3, α2=0.005 dB/m.
 Figure 9. f=60 Hz, h=60 m, c1=1500 m/s, c2=2000 m/s,
ρ1=1000 kg/m3, ρ2=2000 kg/m3, α2=0.010 dB/m.

The acoustical field distribution in the fluid-solid two layered underwater environment in the
case of Fig. 7 is also shown in Fig. 10 as an example.

Figure 10. The acoustic field distribuion for the fluid-solid two layered enviroment.

5. CONCLUSION
In this work, the transmission loss calculations in the layered underwater acoustic
environments are calculated by the FDTD methods and validated by the results of the
KRAKEN program or vice versa. Three scenarios of one layered, fluid-fluid and fluid-solid
two layered medium are considered. Excellent agreement is found between two methods for
all scenarios. The results show the ability and capability of the FDTD method for using as a
validation tool in underwater acoustic problems. As a future work, it is aimed to develop three
dimension FDTD model with the surface roughness, a vertically layered bottom profile having
a step and a slope to gain the more ability for calculating the TL in more realistic
environments.

REFERENCES
[1] A. Taflove, S. C. Hagness, (2005), “Computational Electrodynamics: The Finite
Difference Time Domain Method”, 3rd. ed., Norwood, MA, Artech House.
[2] Q. H. Liu, J. Tao, “The perfectly matched layer for acoustic waves in absorptive media,”
J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 102 (4), pp. 2072-2082, October 1997.
[3] M. B. Porter, (1992), “The KRAKEN normal mode program”, Naval Research Lab.,
Washington DC, USA.