Multiple acoustic diffraction around rigid parallel wide barriers

A ray-based method is presented for evaluating multiple acoustic diffraction by separate rigid and parallel wide barriers, where two or more neighboring ones are of equal height. Based on the geometrical theory of diffraction and extended from the exact boundary solution for a rigid wedge, the proposed method is able to determine the multiple diffraction along arbitrary directions or at arbitrary receiver locations around the diffracting edges, including the positions along the shadow or reflection boundaries or very close to the edges. Comparisons between the results of the numerical simulations and the boundary element method show validity of the proposed method.