WaveLab

WaveLab is a unique platform for immersive wave experimentation in acoustic media. It has the ability to completely immerse a physical experiment in a numerical environment in real time, and let the two domains interact and drive each other.

For the 3D laboratory, water is chosen as the background medium because of its relative ease of integrating sensors and sources, and lower propagation velocities and impedance differential compared to solids. The laboratory is constructed such that the physical area of interest is surrounded by a recording surface densely populated with sensors while the walls of the tank are lined with acoustic projectors.

The data from the sensors is then fed into an acquisition, compute and control system which is able to compute, in real-time, the wavefield and it's interaction with the surrounding numerical domain as it approaches the acoustic projectors. The interaction between the physical and numerical domain takes place at the edge of the physical laboratory and is governed by immersive boundary conditions. The wavefield is constructed in such a way that it both cancels the reflections from the walls and creates the signals that return from the numerical domain.

WaveLab is pushing the frontier of high performance computing. We have partnered with National Instruments to develop an acquisition, compute and control system able to compute in microseconds an intricate wavefield at hundreds of locations. The system contains over 500 FPGAs and employs National Instrument’s FPGA-based FlexRio data acquisition technology. WaveLab also requires large quantities of high-quality underwater transducers, which were designed and constructed in collaboration with Prof. Michael Haberman and his group at the University of Texas at Austin.

In addition to the 3-D underwater acoustic laboratory, 1-D and 2-D immersive laboratories in air-filled waveguides have been constructed.