acousticHelmholtzFoam: an MPI-parallel unstructured finite-volume solver for frequency-domain acoustics in heterogeneous two-phase media with perfectly matched layers
Abstract
acousticHelmholtzFoam is an OpenFOAM application that computes time-harmonic acoustic pressure fields in heterogeneous gas-liquid media on unstructured polyhedral meshes. The complex pressure is stored as real and imaginary volume fields, the material coefficients are constructed from a volume-of-fluid phase fraction with geometric face-fraction averaging, and open boundaries are truncated by Cartesian perfectly matched layers (PMLs) whose damping tensor is generated by the companion utility setPMLFields. The two coupled real-valued equations are discretized with the cell-centred finite-volume operators of OpenFOAM and assembled explicitly, including processor couplings and boundary contributions, into a distributed PETSc matrix that is solved by default with the MUMPS sparse direct solver. The solver writes pressure amplitude, complex velocity, acoustic radiation pressure and time-averaged momentum flux for acoustic-force evaluation. This paper documents the implemented equations, the case interface, the assembly and solution algorithm, the build procedure and the test infrastructure. A layered gas-liquid-PML case with an analytical solution serves as an end-to-end regression: on 8000 cells the whole-domain relative complex-pressure error is 1.197×10−3, and serial and MPI solutions on up to eight ranks agree to within 10−12 in relative L2 norm. A single-axis acoustic-levitator height sweep with constant-volume spheroidal drops demonstrates the two-phase material input and the force output, and strong- and problem-size-scaling measurements characterize the direct-solver workflow. The numerical formulation and its verification are presented in a companion paper (arXiv:2610.01593).
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BibTeX
@misc{xu2026acoustichelmholtzfoam,
title = {{acousticHelmholtzFoam: an MPI-parallel unstructured finite-volume solver for frequency-domain acoustics in heterogeneous two-phase media with perfectly matched layers}},
author = {Chuanchao Xu and Jun Liu and Dieter Bothe and Tomislav Maric},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.14057},
eprint = {2610.14057},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14057},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - acousticHelmholtzFoam: an MPI-parallel unstructured finite-volume solver for frequency-domain acoustics in heterogeneous two-phase media with perfectly matched layers
AU - Chuanchao Xu
AU - Jun Liu
AU - Dieter Bothe
AU - Tomislav Maric
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/06
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.14057
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14057
AB - acousticHelmholtzFoam is an OpenFOAM application that computes time-harmonic acoustic pressure fields in heterogeneous gas-liquid media on unstructured polyhedral meshes. The complex pressure is stored as real and imaginary volume fields, the material coefficients are constructed from a volume-of-fluid phase fraction with geometric face-fraction averaging, and open boundaries are truncated by Cartesian perfectly matched layers (PMLs) whose damping tensor is generated by the companion utility setPMLFields. The two coupled real-valued equations are discretized with the cell-centred finite-volume operators of OpenFOAM and assembled explicitly, including processor couplings and boundary contributions, into a distributed PETSc matrix that is solved by default with the MUMPS sparse direct solver. The solver writes pressure amplitude, complex velocity, acoustic radiation pressure and time-averaged momentum flux for acoustic-force evaluation. This paper documents the implemented equations, the case interface, the assembly and solution algorithm, the build procedure and the test infrastructure. A layered gas-liquid-PML case with an analytical solution serves as an end-to-end regression: on 8000 cells the whole-domain relative complex-pressure error is 1.197×10^−3, and serial and MPI solutions on up to eight ranks agree to within 10^−12 in relative L_2 norm. A single-axis acoustic-levitator height sweep with constant-volume spheroidal drops demonstrates the two-phase material input and the force output, and strong- and problem-size-scaling measurements characterize the direct-solver workflow. The numerical formulation and its verification are presented in a companion paper (arXiv:2610.01593).
ER -