HARMBAL

Software to calculate periodic solutions using the harmonic-balance method

Laboratory of Mechanics and Acoustics (LMA), UPR CNRS 7051

Description Results example Download Installation Documentation Publications Acknowledgements Links Contacts

Description

Harmbal is a software for computation of periodic solutions by the harmonic-balance method. It was developed for the study of musical instruments, and the project was initiated during the post-doctorate of Snorre Farner at LMA in 2002.

Harmbal is implemented in C with a nongraphical user interface and should compile on most platforms. It is distributed under CeCILL (a Gnu GPL-compatible license), which allows anyone to modify and improve the code for research purposes.

Example of result obtained with Harmbal (via Gnuplot)

The result of computation of the periodic solution of a (nearly) lossless clarinet model by considering successively 3, 10, 50, and 300 acoustic modes. The result (plotted by Gnuplot) is presented in the frequency domain (left), and in time domain (right) and compared to the analytical solution (known in this particular case and called the "Helmholtz solution"). shoot

Download

The code is available as a compressed "tar" archive: HARMBAL latest version

Installation

Decompress the archive
Under unix run tar -xvzf archive.tgz, and under MS Windows, use the Winzip software
Section Installation in the documentation describes the complete procedure.

Documentation

Latest version of the user documentation is available at http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~farner/pub/harmbal/

Publications

Publications based on the use of Harmbal:

S. Farner and C. Vergez and J. Kergomard and A. Lizée, Contribution to harmonic balance calculations of periodic oscillation for self-sustained musical instruments with focus on single-reed instruments. J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 119 (3), 2006, pp. 1794-1804: Online version (HAL)
Keywords: harmonic balance principles for autonomous systems / structure of the software Harmbal / validation and illustration of Harmbal capabilities with models of musical instruments.
C. Fritz, S. Farner, and J. Kergomard. Some aspects of the harmonic balance method applied to the clarinet. Applied Acoustics, Vol. 65 (12), 2004, pp. 1155-1180: electronic preprint
Keywords: Harmonic balance method applied to study the behaviour of the clarinet.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Joël Gilbert for his assistance from the beginning of the project, through stimulating discussions and by giving us his own Matlab code for harmonic balance computation. The starting point of the project was the work he carried out in 1989 on harmonic balance method for self-sustained musical instruments:
J. Gilbert, J. Kergomard, E. Ngoya. Calculation of the steady-state oscillations of a clarinet using the harmonic balance technique. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 86, 1989, pp. 35-41.
The software has been realised with support from the MOSART IHP network of the EU.
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Contacts

Snorre Farner, postdoc: farner (a) pvv.ntnu.no
Christophe Vergez, researcher (CNRS, LMA): vergez (a) lma.cnrs-mrs.fr
Jean Kergomard, researcher (CNRS, LMA): kergomard (a) lma.cnrs-mrs.fr

Description Results example Download Installation Documentation Publications Acknowledgements Links Contacts