COMBINATION OF FUZZY ARITHMETIC AND A FAST BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHOD FOR ACOUSTIC SIMULATION WITH UNCERTAINTIES

A so-called FuzzBEM methodology for analyzing the influence of uncertain acoustic and structural parameters on the radiated sound field of vibrating structures combining fuzzy arithmetic and fast multipole boundary element method is introduced. Uncertainties in acoustic properties may result from uncertain parameters of the vibrating mechanical structures, e.g. material density or geometry, as well as from uncertainties in the acoustic domain, e.g. sound velocity. The use of the transformation method in the proposed approach allows to employ simulation tools based on the crisp number arithmetic by appropriate preprocessing of the fuzzy numbers modeling the uncertain input parameters and postprocessing of the simulation results to determine the fuzzy numbers for the considered output quantities. In this contribution, the proposed FuzzBEM procedure is applied to a sound radiating, vibrating stiffened cylindrical shell where the investigated uncertainties include the shell wall thickness and the driving frequency of a monofrequency point load and the air density and sound velocity. As exemplary output quantities of acoustic performance, the acoustic pressure at multiple field points and the radiated sound power are evaluated. The proposed coupling of fuzzy arithmetic and acoustic boundary elements yields run times two orders of magnitudes or more longer than a single BEM calculation. Nevertheless, the systematic parameterization obtained by the proposed fuzzy analysis has the potential to reveal input–output relationships difficult to identify with individual conventional BEM simulation runs.