Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Nonlinear acoustics
Summary
Nonlinear acoustics (NLA) is a branch of physics and acoustics dealing with sound waves of sufficiently large amplitudes. Large amplitudes require using full systems of governing equations of fluid dynamics (for sound waves in liquids and gases) and elasticity (for sound waves in solids). These equations are generally nonlinear, and their traditional linearization is no longer possible. The solutions of these equations show that, due to the effects of nonlinearity, sound waves are being distorted as they travel.
A sound wave propagates through a material as a localized pressure change. Increasing the pressure of a gas or fluid increases its local temperature. The local speed of sound in a compressible material increases with temperature; as a result, the wave travels faster during the high pressure phase of the oscillation than during the lower pressure phase. This affects the wave's frequency structure; for example, in an initially plain sinusoidal wave of a single frequency, the peaks of the wave travel faster than the troughs, and the pulse becomes cumulatively more like a sawtooth wave. In other words, the wave distorts itself. In doing so, other frequency components are introduced, which can be described by the Fourier series. This phenomenon is characteristic of a nonlinear system, since a linear acoustic system responds only to the driving frequency. This always occurs but the effects of geometric spreading and of absorption usually overcome the self-distortion, so linear behavior usually prevails and nonlinear acoustic propagation occurs only for very large amplitudes and only near the source.
Additionally, waves of different amplitudes will generate different pressure gradients, contributing to the nonlinear effect.
The pressure changes within a medium cause the wave energy to transfer to higher harmonics. Since attenuation generally increases with frequency, a countereffect exists that changes the nature of the nonlinear effect over distance. To describe their level of nonlinearity, materials can be given a nonlinearity parameter, .
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related courses (9)
EE-548: Audio engineering
This lecture is oriented towards the study of audio engineering, with a special focus on room acoustics applications. The learning outcomes will be the techniques for microphones and loudspeaker desig
EE-348: Electroacoustics
Ce cours a pour objectif de former les étudiants de section Génie Electrique et Electronique à la conception de systèmes acoustiques, à l'aide d'un formalisme basé sur l'électrotechnique. A la fin du
EE-490(a): Lab in acoustics
Apply the knowledge acquired in Electroacoustics, Audio Engineering and Propagation of Acoustic Waves lectures.