Citation: Gulistan, A., Rahman, M. M., Ghosh, S. ORCID: 0000-0002-1992-2289 and Rahman, B. M. ORCID: 0000-0001-6384-0961 (2019). Elimination of spurious modes in fullvectorial finite element method based acoustic modal solution.This is the published version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Permanent repository link: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/22191/ Link to published version: http://dx.Abstract: Finite element method is a powerful technique for solving a wide range of engineering problems. However, the existence of the spurious solutions in full-vectorial finite element method has been a major problem for both acoustic and optic modal analyses. For emerging photonic devices exploiting light-sound interactions in high index contrast waveguides, this problem is a major limitation. A penalty function is introduced to remove these unwanted spurious modes in acoustic waveguides, which also identifies the acoustic modes more easily. Numerically simulated results also show considerably improved vector mode profiles. The proposed penalty method has been applied for the characterization of low index contrast single mode fiber and also for high index contrast silicon nanowire to demonstrate its effectiveness.