A spatial extrapolation technique for sparse measurements of propeller induced hull-pressures using an inverse acoustic boundary element method

This paper presents a computational method for obtaining a complete description of the propeller-induced fluctuating ship hull-pressure field on the basis of only a few hull-pressure measurements. The method relies on the inverse use of a boundary element method (BEM) for underwater acoustic diffraction on ship hulls. It enables the determination of the ship's forcing terms for input into finite element vibration analyses. As a by-product, the propeller source strength is computed on the basis of which the correlation between model and ship scale hull-pressure data may be established.