WaveLab
WaveLab is a unique platform for immersive wave experimentation and is the next generation in physical acoustic laboratories. It has the ability to completely immerse a physical experiment in a numerical environment in real time, and the two domains interact and drive each other. A number of experiments are planned to be used with the WaveLab platform including studying complex materials at lower frequencies by eliminating unwanted reflections, and developing a system for acoustic cloaking and acoustic holography.
Water is chosen to be the acoustic medium because of the relative ease of integrating sensors and sources, and slower wave propagation speed compared to solids while still having a low impedance differential. The laboratory is being constructed such that the physical area of interest is surrounded by acoustic sensors, and further away it is in turn surrounded by the walls of the tank which are lined with acoustic projectors. The data from the sensors is then fed into a numerical model which is able in real-time to simulate the wave field as it approaches the acoustic projectors and the surrounding, larger numerical domain. The interaction between the physical and numerical domains takes place at the edge of the physical experiment. The necessary wave field to be injected by transducers is calculated to cancel the reflections from the walls and create signals that enter from the numerical domain.
WaveLab is pushing the frontier of high performance computing. We have partnered with National Instruments and Elluminance to develop a system able to compute in microseconds an intricate wave field at hundreds of locations. The computational system employs National Instrument’s PXI system using Labview RT and FPGA-based FlexRio data acquisition technology.
Related publications
“Immersive experimentation in a wave propagation laboratory”, Vasmel, M., Robertsson, J. O. A., van Manen, D.-J. and Curtis, A., The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134, EL492-EL498 (2013). DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4826912
“Broadband cloaking and holography with exact boundary conditions”, van Manen, D.-J., Vasmel, M., Greenhalgh, S., and Robertsson, J. O. A., The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137, EL415-EL421 (2015). DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4921340
Current members
Christoph Bärlocher, Theodor Becker, Nele Börsing, Filippo Broggini, Carly Donahue, Johan Robertsson, Dirk-Jan van Manen, and Marlies Vasmel
See also
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