The effects of the inclination angle of the incisor on the speech production of the fricative consonant /s/ was investigated using an implicit compressible flow solver. The hierarchical structure grid was applied to reduce the grid generation time for the vocal tract geometry. The airflow and sound during the pronunciation of /s/ were simulated using the adaptively switched time stepping scheme, and the angle of the incisor in the vocal tract was changed from normal position up to 30°. The results showed that increasing the incisor angle affected the flow configuration and moved the location of the high turbulence intensity region thereby decreased the amplitudes of the sound in the frequency range from 8 to 12 kHz. Performing the Fourier transform on the velocity fluctuation, we found that the position of large magnitudes of the velocity at 10 kHz shifted toward the lip outlet when the incisor angle was increased. In addition, separate acoustic simulations showed that the shift in the potential sound source position decreased the far-field sound amplitudes above 8 kHz. These results provide the underlying insights necessary to design dental prostheses for the production of sibilant fricatives.

The physical variables involved in a flow field are of very different scales to those of the aeroacoustic field within the flow. Thus, direct aeroacoustic computations (DACs) require extremely small time steps to capture the fluctuations in the aeroacoustic field and stabilize the numerical scheme. As a result, the computation time for DACs can be very long. This paper describes an implicit Adaptively Switched Time Stepping (ASTS) scheme that enables the use of larger time steps when solving DAC problems. ASTS is based on the adaptive selection of the time stepping scheme according to the value of the residual. Early in the iteration process, an artificial time term is used to afford larger time steps while ensuring that the numerical scheme remains stable. Once the residual is less than some preset reference value, the artificial time term is removed, thus eliminating the Newton linearization error. Simulation results show that ASTS can reduce the computational cost of DACs by a factor of more than eight while maintaining the required level of accuracy.

A numerical simulation of sibilant /s/ production with the realistically moving vocal tract was conducted to investigate the flow and acoustic characteristics during the articulation process of velopharyngeal closure and tongue movement. The articulation process was simulated from the end of /u/ to the middle of /s/ in the Japanese word /usui/, including the tongue elevation and the velopharyngeal valve closure. The time-dependent vocal tract geometry was reconstructed from the computed tomography scan. The moving immersed boundary method with the hierarchical structure grid was adopted to approach the complex geometry of the human speech organs. The acoustic characteristics during the co-articulation process were observed and consistent with the acoustic measurement for the subject of the scan. The further simulations with the different closing speeds of the velopharyngeal closure showed that the far-field sound during the co-articulation process was amplified with the slower closing case, and the velum closure speed was inverse proportional to the sound amplitude with the slope value of − 35.3 dB s/m. This indicates possible phonation of indistinguishable aeroacoustics sound between /u/ and /s/ with slower velopharyngeal closure.