Louis R. Dragonette
Phys. Acoust. Branch, 4555 Overlook Ave., S.W., Washington, DC 20375-5350
One of the outstanding benefits that resulted from Flax's work on the scattering from simple shapes was the impetus given to isolating and understanding basic scattering mechanisms. For example, his pioneering work on the development of acoustic resonance theory described methods for the separation of elastic and geometric contributions to the scattered field, and for differentiating between elastic methods. As the targets considered become more complicated, isolation of generally overlapping mechanisms becomes increasingly more difficult. Standard time/frequency approaches and newer techniques such as wave packet analysis can be applied to these problems, with confidence obtained from their applications to the well understood canonical shapes. Examples of the isolation of scattering mechanisms derived from targets of increasing complexity are presented.