Coupled Mode Sound Propagation in Inhomogeneous Stratified Waveguides

An efficient coupled mode method for modeling sound propagation in horizontally stratified inhomogeneous waveguides, in which the seabed is modeled as a (layered) acoustic medium, is presented. The method is based on Fawcett’s coupled mode method and the multimodal admittance method. The acoustic field is expanded onto the unusual local eigenfunctions composed by normal modes in the corresponding one-layer homogeneous waveguides with constant depth equal to the local total depth of the multilayered waveguide. A set of energy-conserving first-order differential equations governing the modal amplitudes of acoustic fields is derived. The admittance method is employed to solve the differential equations in a numerically stable manna. The coupled mode method considers the backscattering effect of inhomogeneities and full coupling between local modes, and offers improvement from the viewpoint of efficiency and computational cost. The acoustic fields predicted by the method agree well with those computed by the commercial finite element software COMSOL Multiphysics. The method can be extended to further establish fast and accurate 3D sound propagation models in complex shallow water environments.