A spherical expansion for audio sounds generated by a circular parametric array loudspeaker.

The existing non-paraxial expression of audio sounds generated by a parametric array loudspeaker (pal) is hard to calculate due to the fivefold integral in it. A rigorous solution of the Westervelt equation under the quasilinear approximation is developed in this paper for circular PALs by using the spherical harmonics expansion, which simplifies the expression into a series of threefold summations with uncoupled angular and radial components. The angular component is determined by Legendre polynomials and the radial one is an integral involving spherical Bessel functions, which converge rapidly. Compared to the direct integration over the whole space, the spherical expansion is rigorous, exact, and can be calculated efficiently. The simulations show the proposed expression can obtain the same accurate results with a speed of at least 15 times faster than the existing one.