For the even acoustic waveguide mode , set and . At leading independent-edge order for large , the two incident travelling constituents each have amplitude at the relevant wall endpoint. Reflecting the upper-edge coordinates reverses the edge-wave sign. Their path phases are . Thus Sommerfeld half-plane diffraction gives the displayed sum, where . For , the apparent poles at are removable in the combined expression, with limit . Single-edge nonuniform far-field poles are not physical infinities. This combined far-field limit assumes a radiation distance beyond the aperture's near field and neglects further edge interactions; it is not uniform at duct cutoff.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2006 iii Paper 82 2 b i Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Take a cut-on mode with , put and , so , , and initially take . The acoustic waveguide mode splits into two acoustic plane waves:At the upper edge , the upward-going constituent is incident from below. Use the reflected local coordinate ; its incident potential becomes , with local incidence angle . At the lower edge use and the downward-going constituent; it has the same local incident amplitude and incidence angle. At each wall the other constituent is the geometrical optics reflection of this incident half-amplitude, so it must not be counted again as an independent incident wave at the same edge.
Let . For a far observer, the upper and lower local observation angles are and , and their distances are and . Applying the Wiener-Hopf solution of rigid half-plane diffraction separately givesThe sign difference is the reversal of the upper-edge transverse coordinate. Their sum is the leading independent-edge radiation from an open planar duct:Restore if a time-dependent potential is desired. This is the leading large- approximation, neglecting further diffraction between edges, and assumes a far-field distance as well as . It is not a uniform approximation for a mode approaching cutoff. The zero mode follows as the grazing-incidence limit ; its beam-direction limit is treated separately below.