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A Virtual Wave Tank : Feel free to have a splash around.

The program here was created for simple online demonstrations of various acoustic phenomena including wave propagation, interference, reflection, standing waves, diffraction, diffusion, dispersion, etc. The program lets you select from a list of online examples or create and save your own.

Click Here To Run WaveTank

The virtual medium is shown in black which by default you can momentarily excite by clicking. Positive pressure is in shades of red and negative pressure in shades of blue.

If you opt to add a source you can position multiple sources in the medium and subsequently chose their respective frequency, amplitude, phase and type (e.g. sinusoid, band limited noise, Gaussian pulse, etc).

You can select specific areas of the medium to change material properties such as density, stiffness and damping. For more detailed description/control of the medium you can import your own 24-bit colour bitmaps to specify rigid boundaries (as black) and other regions of different colours with which to associate different material properties.

Here are some examples...

Two sources out of phase constructively and destructively interfere.

Waves propagating from a horn. The flare of the horn modifies wave curvature and speed and thus changes the effective length and modal response of the pipe from that of a closed-open pipe to something more approaching a closed-closed pipe.

Diffraction around a wall.

First order mode in a guitar body excited by low frequency noise. When running the example the area will oscillate between positive red and negative blue values at a frequency defined by the it's dimensions and shape.

The musical effect of blowing over a bottle is simulated by letting some of the medium flow over the neck which in conjuction with a small noise source at the top of the neck results in an oscillation.

Waves scattering along a diffuser design. View the online example to see the break up of wavefronts with resect to time.

PLEASE NOTE

Although this has been written as a bit of fun, if you find this application useful (he's says optimistically) please feel free to drop me a line (i.drumm@salford.ac.uk) with any comments, suggestions or even files you have created from this application that you'd like to see in the online demonstations. At some point I'll add the likes of absorbing boundaries using z-transforms, better flow modelling, etc when I get a break from other duties.

Ian Drumm