Scattering by thin shells in fluids: Fast solver and experimental validation.

A numerical model facilitating fast analysis of acoustic scattering by thin shells immersed in fluids is presented. The shell is simulated by an effective boundary condition, in which the inertial properties of the shell are taken into account while the elastic ones are neglected. The problem reduces to a hypersingular surface integral equation, which is solved using the boundary element method accelerated by the multilevel nonuniform grid approach. The validity of the numerical method and the adopted physical approximations were tested by comparison with a water tank experiment on acoustic scattering from cylindrical metallic shells filled with water.