openPSTD

openPSTD is the implementation of the Fourier pseudospectral time-domain (PSTD) method for computing the propagation of sound, geared towards applications in the built environment. Being a wave-based method, PSTD captures phenomena like diffraction, but maintains efficiency in processing time and memory usage as it allows to spatially sample close to the Nyquist criterion, thus keeping both the required spatial and temporal resolution coarse. In the implementation it has been opted to model the physical geometry as a composition of rectangular two-dimensional subdomains, hence initially restricting the implementation to orthogonal and two-dimensional situations. The strategy of using subdomains divides the problem domain into local subsets, which enables the simulation software to be built according to Object-Oriented Programming best practices and allows room for further computational parallelization. The software is built using the open source components, Blender, Numpy and Python. For accelerating the software, an option has been included to accelerate the calculations by a partial implementation of the code on the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), which increases the throughput by up to fifteen times.