This volume includes articles on the mathematical modeling and numerical simulation of various wave phenomena. For many years Waves 2003 and its five prior conferences have been an important forum for discussions on wave propagation. The topic is equally important for fundamental sciences, engineering, mathematics and, in particular, for industrial applications. Areas of specific interest are acoustics, electromagnetics, elasticity and related inverse and optimization problems. This book gives an extensive overview of recent developments in a very active field of scientific computing.

Finding the sources of sound in large nonlinear fields via direct simulation currently requires excessive computational cost. This paper describes a simple technique for efficiently solving the multidimensional nonlinear Euler equations that significantly reduces this cost and demonstrates a useful approach for validating high order nonlinear methods. Up to 15th order accuracy in space and time methods were compared and it is shown that an algorithm with a fixed design accuracy approaches its maximal utility and then its usefulness exponentially decays unless higher accuracy is used. It is concluded that at least a 7th order method is required to efficiently propagate a harmonic wave using the nonlinear Euler equations to a distance of 5 wavelengths while maintaining an overall error tolerance that is low enough to capture both the mean flow and the acoustics. Dyson, Rodger W. Glenn Research Center NASA/TM-2001-210985, E-12839, NAS 1.15:210985