Heuristic Physical Theory of Diffraction for Impedance Polygon

A heuristic physical theory of diffraction (PTD) for an acoustic impedance wedge is proposed. This method is based on Ufimtsev's three-dimensional PTD, which is derived for an acoustic soft or hard wedge. We modify the original PTD according to the process of physical optics (or the Kirchhoff approximation) to obtain a 3D heuristic diffraction model for an impedance wedge. In principle, our result is equivalent to Luebbers' model presented in electromagnetism. Moreover, our approach provides a useful insight into the theoretical basis of the existing heuristic diffraction methods. The derived heuristic PTD is applied to an arbitrary impedance polygon, and a simple PTD formula is derived as a supplement to the physical optics formula.