Reduced basis methods for numerical room acoustic simulations with parametrized boundaries

The use of model-based numerical simulation of wave propagation in rooms for engineering applications requires that acoustic conditions for multiple parameters are evaluated iteratively and this is computationally expensive. We present a reduced basis methods (RBM) to achieve a computational cost reduction relative to a traditional full order model (FOM), for wave-based room acoustic simulations with parametrized boundary conditions. In this study, the FOM solver is based on the spectral element method, however other numerical methods could be applied. The RBM reduces the computational burden by solving the problem in a low-dimensional subspace for parametrized frequency-independent and frequency-dependent boundary conditions. The problem is formulated and solved in the Laplace domain, which ensures the stability of the reduced order model based on the RBM approach. We study the potential of the proposed RBM framework in terms of computational efficiency, accuracy and storage requirements and we show that the RBM leads to 100-fold speed-ups for a 2D case with an upper frequency of 2kHz and around 1000-fold speed-ups for an analogous 3D case with an upper frequency of 1kHz. While the FOM simulations needed to construct the ROM are expensive, we demonstrate that despite this cost, the ROM has a potential of three orders of magnitude faster than the FOM when four different boundary conditions are simulated per room surface. Moreover, results show that the storage model for the ROM is relatively high but affordable for the presented 2D and 3D cases.