Peter Westervelt (December 16, 1919 – January 24, 2015) was an American physicist, noted for his work in nonlinear acoustics, and Professor Emeritus of Physics at Brown University.
[5] Westervelt began his career in 1940-41 at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory, where he worked with researchers including Frederick Vinton Hunt,[6] Leo Beranek (National Medal of Science winner) and Phillip Morse[7] during the Second World War.
He served as Assistant Attache for Research, U.S. Navy, at the American Embassy in London, U.K., and as a Consultant to Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (now BBN Technologies).
Westervelt also performed research at the University of Texas at Austin, where he developed new techniques, having widespread application, for the study of sound-by-sound scattering and the laser-excited thermoacoustics.
He is especially renowned for his application of the theory of Sir Michael James Lighthill, for his important contributions to the understanding of nonlinear scattering of sound by sound, and for his discoveries of the parametric array[9] and the laser-excited thermoacoustic array.