Boundary Conditions

The relations of the previous section do not hold exactly when the string length is finite. A finite-length string forces consideration of boundary conditions. In this section, we will introduce boundary conditions as perturbations of the state transition matrix. In addition, we will use the DW-FDTD equivalence to obtain physically well behaved boundary conditions for the FDTD method.

Consider an ideal vibrating string with spatial samples. This is a sufficiently large number to make clear most of the repeating patterns in the general case. Introducing boundary conditions is most straightforward in the DW paradigm. We therefore begin with the order 8 DW model, for which the state vector (for the 0th subgrid) will be

The displacement output matrix is given by

and the input matrix is an arbitrary matrix. We will choose a scalar input signal driving the displacement of the second spatial sample with unit gain:

The state transition matrix is obtained by reducing Eq.(E.32) to finite order in some way, thereby introducing boundary conditions.

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Subsections

• Resistive Terminations
• Boundary Conditions as Perturbations
• Reactive Terminations
• Interior Scattering Junctions

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About the Author: Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.