• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.1-11
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• 2017

In this study, novel approximate form of the square-root operator of three dimensional acoustic Parabolic Equation (3D PE) is proposed using a rational approximant for two variables. This form has two advantages in comparison with existing approximation studies of the square-root operator. One is the wide-angle capability. The proposed form has wider angle accuracy to the inclination angle of ${\pm}62^{\circ}$ from the range axis of 3D PE at the bearing angle of $45^{\circ}$, which is approximately three times the angle limit of the existing 3D PE algorithm. Another is that the denominator of our approximate form can be expressed into the product of one-dimensional operators for depth and cross-range. Such a splitting form is very preferable in the numerical analysis in that the 3D PE can be easily transformed into the tridiagonal matrix equation. To confirm the capability of the proposed approximate form, comparative study of other approximation methods is conducted based on the phase error analysis, and the proposed method shows best performance.