Multithread BEM computation for packed silencers

Bulk-reacting sound absorbing materials are often used in packed silencers to reduce broadband noise. A bulk-reacting material is characterized by a complex mean density and a complex speed of sound. Recently, a so-called direct mixed-body boundary element method has been developed to model a packed silencer in a user-friendly and single-domain BEM approach. However, due to the complexity of the integral equations, a lot of time is spent in doing numerical integration to form the BEM matrix. In this study, a multithread BEM computation is implemented on an SMP workstation running Windows NT/2000. Both the matrix formation part and the matrix solution part are parallelized. A parallel efficiency of more than 0.9 can be achieved on a dual-processor PIII500 PC workstation. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the parallel performance.