Stochastic simulation of the high-frequency wave propagation in a random medium

Abstract

A stochastic model is proposed to simulate the propagation of an acoustic wave in a random medium characterized by weak velocity fluctuations. After the acoustic wave propagation through a random velocity field, the propagation field becomes itself a random field. In the developed stochastic approach, the wave field in such random medium is modeled by the combination of the wave field in a mean homogeneous medium and of fluctuation corrections. These corrections are provided by a random field generator whose inputs are the statistical moments of the travel times. Using this stochastic modeling, the propagation of both an incident plane wave and an acoustic realistic beam generated by a real transducer in a random velocity field is calculated and the corresponding simulations are validated by comparison with those obtained with a deterministic model based on geometrical optics. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.