Hybrid Equivalent Circuit/Finite Element/Boundary Element Modeling for Effective Analysis of an Acoustic Transducer Array with Flexible Surrounding Structures

Transducer arrays are commonly analyzed by the finite element method (FEM) with high accuracy, but it is costly, particularly when having flexible surrounding structures. In this study, we developed an equivalent circuit (EC)-based model of an array of transducers with flexible surrounding structures for effective analysis. The impedance matrix was first constructed by coupling the electrical, mechanical impedance, and the acoustic radiation impedance obtained by the EC method and finite element-boundary element (FE-BE) coupling method. The transfer matrix of far-field pressure to the transducer response was then constructed by the FE-BE coupling method, and finally the sound pressure of the external acoustic field was obtained. To verify the accuracy, the results of the proposed method were compared with those of the conventional FEM. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method, the reduction in the degrees of freedom (DOFs) of the proposed method from the conventional FEM analysis was investigated. The simulation results of the proposed method are highly accurate and efficient. The proposed method is expected to be useful for conceptual design.

A Feasibility Study of 2-D Microwave Thorax Imaging Based on the Supervised Descent Method

In this paper, the application of the supervised descent method (SDM) for 2-D microwave thorax imaging is studied. The forward modeling problem is solved by the finite element-boundary integral (FE-BI) method. According to the prior information of human thorax, a 3-ellipse training set is generated offline. Then, the average descent direction between an initial background model and the training models is calculated. Finally, the reconstruction of the testing thorax model is achieved based on the average descent directions online. The feasibility using One-Step SDM for thorax imaging is studied. Numerical results indicate that the structural information of thorax can be reconstructed. It has potential for real-time imaging in future clinical diagnosis.

Hybrid Finite Element Analysis of Heat Conduction in Orthotropic Media with Variable Thermal Conductivities

A hybrid finite element method is proposed for the heat conduction analysis with variable thermal conductivities. A linear combination of fundamental solutions is employed to approximate the intra-element temperature field while standard one-dimensional shape functions are utilized to independently define the frame temperature field along the element boundary. The influence of variable thermal conductivities embeds in the intra-element temperature field via the fundamental solution. A hybrid variational functional, which involves integrals along the element boundary only, is developed to link the two assumed fields to produce the thermal stiffness equation. The advantage of the proposed method lies that the changes in the thermal conductivity are captured inside the element domain. Numerical examples demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method and also the insensitivity to mesh distortion.