Wave propagation with irregular dissipation and applications to acoustic problems and shallow waters

Abstract

In this paper we consider an acoustic problem of wave propagation through a discontinuous medium. The problem is reduced to the dissipative wave equation with distributional dissipation. We show that this problem has a so-called very weak solution, we analyse its properties and illustrate the theoretical results through some numerical simulations by approximating the solutions to the full dissipative model for a particular synthetic piecewise continuous medium. In particular, we discover numerically a very interesting phenomenon of the appearance of a new wave at the singular point. For the acoustic problem this can be interpreted as an echo effect at the discontinuity interface of the medium.