A numerical method for time dependent acoustic scattering problems involving smart obstacles and incoming waves of small wavelengths.

In this paper we propose a highly parallelizable numerical method for time dependent acoustic scattering problems involving realistic smart obstacles hit by incoming waves having wavelengths small compared with the characteristic dimension of the obstacles. A smart obstacle is an obstacle that when hit by an incoming wave tries to pursue a goal circulating on its boundary a pressure current. In particular we consider obstacles whose goal is to be undetectable and we refer to them as furtive obstacles. These scattering problems are modelled as optimal control problems for the wave equation. We validate the method proposed to solve the optimal control problem considered on some test problems where a "smart" simplified version of the NASA space shuttle is hit by incoming waves with small wavelengths compared to its characteristic dimension. That is we consider test problems with ratio between the characteristic dimension of the obstacle and wavelength of the time harmonic component of the incoming wave up to approximately one hundred. The website: http://www.econ.univpm.it/recchioni/w14 contains animations and virtual reality applications showing some numerical experiments relative to the problems studied in this paper. © 2006 American Institute of Physics.