Challenges in Technical Acoustics: What Can Be Computed Today?

Numerical procedures, such as the finite element and boundary element methods, are known to be very suitable tools for the investigation of acoustical problems. It turned out, however, that early formulations of these methodologies are rather computer time consuming and therefore not used very often in practical applications. The contribution aims to give an overview of the current possibilities of numerical methods and shows some facts of today’s real live applications. Also the fears that computer simulations will replace measurements completely will be addressed by means of representative examples. Finally, it will be discussed how in the future modern computations will be performed and which topics will be of particular interest in current research. All methodologies discussed in this contribution are introduced briefly and illustrated by examples which show how the approaches can be used and how accurate they are.