The Lighthill acoustic analogy for a moving body has a volume acoustic quadrupole, a surface acoustic monopole from acoustic thickness noise, and a surface acoustic dipole from acoustic loading noise. For an impermeable moving surface, with outward normal , normal surface speed , and fluid and body normal velocities equal, the surface mass coefficient is and the surface loading is the force exerted on the fluid. Schematically, the density-source equation is
The density perturbation is understood with the chosen interior extension. Permeable-surface versions have additional mass and momentum flux terms. Source approximations must distinguish local thickness radiation from cancellation of its compact net-volume contribution.
Interpret the surface delta as , so integration against it gives a surface integral. If is signed distance, this equals the notation directly. This convention is needed because an arbitrary rescaling of the level-set function must not change the physical source.
Define the volume flux and total pressure force . Here is the rate of change of body volume, not the volume itself. The surface acoustic monopole contributes, in the acoustic compact-source approximation,
The surface acoustic dipole contributes
The second term is a nonradiating near-field term and is smaller in the acoustic far field. Writing with the observation point fixed, the leading augmentation is therefore
The printed dipole coefficient is missing a factor . The extra inverse speed follows from differentiating , and is required dimensionally: the printed expression with has the units of density times speed. This corrected acoustic loading noise term also agrees with the far-field acoustic force and stress moments. The monopole coefficient is unchanged.
In the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings equation, the other source types are a surface acoustic monopole associated with acoustic thickness noise, and a volume acoustic quadrupole involving the Lighthill stress tensor. On an impermeable material surface, fluid and surface normal velocities agree. There is no through-surface mass-flux source; the remaining thickness source is . For a rigid body, the leading acoustic compact-source approximation to that source has
Thus there is no leading net-volume acoustic monopole. To neglect thickness radiation beyond that leading cancellation, assume negligible volume displacement, as for ideal thin blades, or that its higher multipoles are small compared with the retained acoustic loading noise. Rigidity alone does not make a moving finite-volume body's local thickness source identically zero.
The volume acoustic quadrupole may be neglected for low Mach number motion when exterior turbulent or nonlinear stresses do not provide a competing strong source. We also assume small linear acoustics perturbations, a uniform reference sound speed, and negligible relevant viscous and entropy sources. These are source-strength approximations, particularly important if a loading contribution itself cancels by symmetry. Under them, the retained acoustic dipole is the force exerted by the object on the fluid, with the sign used in the previous solution.
Let , , and . In the acoustic far field, is large compared with the object and . For a source of size with and small surface Mach number, source-dependent delays and the Doppler factor can be neglected to leading order. The surface integral then contains just the total force . Differentiating its retarded time, rather than its spreading factor, gives the radiating term
The sign follows from . Differentiating or the direction instead produces the lower-order near field. A constant total force does not radiate at this leading compact order.
For a small rigid sphere translating with velocity , the integrated thickness source vanishes. The first spatial moment is instead , where is the sphere volume. Expanding the retarded time across the compact source gives the displayed first nonzero thickness field. It is an acoustic dipole, at the same order as acoustic loading noise for a translating sphere. The added mass of a sphere supplies half this volume-mass coefficient through the loading term; their sum is .