LOW-FREQUENCY ACOUSTIC SCATTERING OF A PLANE WAVE FROM A SOFT AND HARD TORUS.

A plane acoustic wave is scattered by either a soft or a hard small torus. The incident wave has a wavelength which is much larger than the characteristic dimension of the scatterer and thus the low-frequency approximation method is applicable to the scattering problem. It is shown that there exists exactly one toroidal coordinate system that fits the given geometry. The R-separation of variables is utilized to obtain the series expansion of the fields in terms of toroidal harmonics (half-integer Legendre functions of first and second kind). The scattering problem for the soft torus is solved analytically for the near field, governing the leading two low-frequency coefficients, as well as for the far field, where both the amplitude and the cross-section are evaluated. The scattering problem for the hard torus appears to be much more complicated in calculations. The Neumann boundary condition on the surface of the torus leads to a three-term recurrence relation for the series coefficients corresponding to the scattered fields. Thus, the potential boundary-value problem for the leading low-frequency approximations is reduced to infinite systems of linear algebraic equations with three-diagonal matrices. An analytical technique for solving systems of diagonal form is developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]