In ultrasonic NDE applications, situations involving propagation of acoustic waves through interfaces are usual. Effects of reflection, refraction, diffraction, and mode changes at interfaces must be considered both to plan and to explain inspections. Ray-tracing based simulation methods, commonly used, have a limited or null consideration of much of involved physic phenomena. In the other hand, numeric methods for acoustic field simulation are usually computationally expensive and non suitable for interactive applications. In this work we present a full matrix formulated method for continuous wave field simulation in which each process: propagation in homogeneous media, refraction at interfaces, etc., are described by matrices that can be composed to model a complex problem with a single Monochromatic Transfer Matrix that can be used to interactively compute fields produced by different excitation patterns of the used transducers. Keywords: Acoustic field simulation; Interfaces; Monochromatic transfer matrix

Peer Reviewed