Reactive acoustic intensity for general fields and energy polarization

A kind of energy polarization is shown to occur in certain acoustic fields, because of energy oscillations due to the instantaneous reactive intensity. The time-averaged behavior of such oscillations is described by a second degree symmetric tensor, which is identified with the time-independent reactive intensity, whose conventional vectorial definition is obtained for particular fields, including monochromatic and spherical ones. © 1996 Acoustical Society of America.