Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2013 iii Paper 70 1 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-07
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 hasThus 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 termThe 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.