DIFFRACTION BY A REFRACTING WEDGE
Abstract
The refraction and scattering of acoustic plane waves following their arrival at the tip of a refracting wedge are examined. The scattered field contains not only plane waves reflected from the plane walls of the prisms but also the field diffracted at the sharp edge. It is not necessary to discuss the dominant refraction effects in any detail because they are so wellknown. The diffraction properties however, are quite unknown. To understand these properties it is necessary to consider the mathematical difficulty of defining a normal derivative on the inside of an acute-angled wedge close to the vertex. It ay be that the uniform use of the interaction conditions across the refracting surfaces at all distances from the vertex leads to no solution, and that the only well-set problem of this type may be one where the wedge has a rounded tip (as when the wedge is of hyperbolic section) with large curvature. The nature of the local field near the edge of a dielectric wedge has, in fact, been examined by taking the local expansion of the field in power series involving distance from the wedge it is not necessarily good for anything more than the electrostatic situation. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 01, 1962
- Accession Number
- AD0275795
Entities
People
- Michael Papadopoulos
Organizations
- University of Wisconsin–Madison