The modern scope of boundary element methods (BEM) for acoustics is reviewed in this paper. Over the last decades the BEM has gained popularity despite suffering from shortcomings, such as fictitious eigenfrequencies and poor scalability due to its dense and frequency-dependent coefficient matrices. Recent research activities have been focused on alleviating these drawbacks to enhance BEM usability across industry and academia. This paper reviews what is commonly known as direct BEM for linear time-harmonic acoustics. After introducing the boundary integral formulation of the Helmholtz equation for interior and exterior acoustic problems, recommendations are given regarding the boundary meshing and treatment of the non-uniqueness problem. It is shown how frequency sweeps and modal analyses can be carried out with BEM. Further extensions for efficient modeling of large-scale problems, including fast BEM and solutions methods, are surveyed. Additionally, this review paper discusses new application areas for modern BEM, such as viscothermal wave propagation, surface contribution analyses, and simulation of periodically arranged structures as found in acoustic metamaterials.

本文回顾了声学边界元法 (BEM) 的现代范围。在过去的几十年中，尽管边界元法存在缺陷，例如由于其密集且与频率相关的系数矩阵而存在虚构的特征频率和可扩展性差等缺点，但它还是获得了普及。最近的研究活动一直集中在减轻这些缺点，以提高跨行业和学术界的 BEM 可用性。本文回顾了线性时谐声学中通常所说的直接边界元法。在介绍了内外声学问题的亥姆霍兹方程的边界积分公式后，对边界网格划分和非唯一性问题的处理给出了建议。它展示了如何使用 BEM 进行频率扫描和模态分析。调查了对大规模问题的有效建模的进一步扩展，包括快速边界元法和解决方案方法。此外，本综述还讨论了现代边界元法的新应用领域，例如粘热波传播、表面贡献分析以及声学超材料中周期性排列结构的模拟。