Midway Evaluation in Industrial Engineering - Satish Kumar Bonthu

Title of thesis:
Reduced Order Modeling for Room Acoustic Simulations in Time Domains

Student:
Satish Kumar Bonthu

Doctoral committee:
Dr. Rúnar Unnþórsson, professor and Head of Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Iceland

Abstract:
Accurate room acoustic simulations are essential across industries — from pro-audio and automotive to architecture, utilities, gaming, and virtual acoustics — and are increasingly used to generate synthetic data for AI/ML audio model training. While Reduced Order Modeling (ROM) can greatly accelerate these simulations, time-domain ROMs often become unstable for long-duration predictions, limiting their reliability. This research investigates the causes of such instability, explores whether stable and accurate parameterized ROMs can be built for varying boundary conditions and source locations, and examines how snapshot and basis design affect the trade-off between stability, accuracy, and efficiency. The ultimate goal is to enable fast, stable, and generalizable ROMs that meet the growing need for large-scale, high-quality acoustic simulations.