Overview of Methods

We will first consider the elementary case of a conical acoustic tube. All smooth horns reduce to the conical case over sufficiently short distances, and the use of many conical sections, connected via scattering junctions, is often used to model an arbitrary bore shape [71]. The conical case is also important because it is essentially the most general shape in which there are exact traveling-wave solutions (spherical waves) [360].

Beyond conical bore shapes, however, one can use a Sturm-Liouville formulation to solve for one-parameter-wave scattering parameters [50]. In this formulation, the curvature of the bore's cross-section (more precisely, the curvature of the one-parameter wave's constant-phase surface area) is treated as a potential function that varies along the horn axis, and the solution is an eigenfunction of this potential. Sturm-Liouville analysis is well known in quantum mechanics for solving elastic scattering problems and for finding the wave functions (at various energy levels) for an electron in a nonuniform potential well.

When the one-parameter-wave assumption breaks down, and multiple acoustic modes are excited, the boundary element method (BEM) is an effective tool [191]. The BEM computes the acoustic field from velocity data along any enclosing surface. There also exist numerical methods for simulating wave propagation in varying cross-sections that include ``mode conversion'' [339,13,117].

This section will be henceforth concerned with non-cylindrical tubes in which backscatter and mode-conversion can be neglected, as treated in [320]. The only exact case is the cone, but smoothly varying horn shapes can be modeled approximately in this way.