It can be a difficult problem to precisely predict the sound field radiated from a finite elastic structure in shallow water channel because of its strong coupling with up-down boundaries and the fluid medium, whose sound field cannot be calculated directly by current methods, such as Ray theory, normal mode theory and other different methods, which are adaptable to sound fields from idealized point sources in waveguide. So far, there is no reliable prediction method to solve this kind of problem. A combined wave superposition method is proposed for such a problem, which combines the traditional wave superposition method with the transfer function in shallow water channel and the multi-physics field coupling numerical model. This method mainly consists of three sections:1) obtaining the normal velocity on the elastic structure surface in shallow water channel by the finite element method (FEM), whose FEM model includes the up-down boundaries and the completely absorbent sound boundaries in the horizontal direction; 2) getting the equivalent point source strength by traditional wave superposition method; 3) calculating the total sound field by adding up each point source field which is obtained by normal mode method. This method is verified by numerical simulation and theoretical analysis by using an imaginary and elastic spherical sound source respectively, and the results demonstrate that the method is valid and has high precision and calculating efficiency. The acoustic radiation characteristics from elastic cylindrical shells is investigated for different acoustic radiation sources, ocean environments and measurements. The cylindrical shell material is steel, whose radius and length are 3 m and 30 m respectively. The shallow water channel is an ideal waveguide with 50 m in depth, at the upper boundary, i.e., the free surface, the lower boundary is the Neumann boundary, i.e., the normal derivative of the acoustic pressure should be zero. The analysis frequency range is from 30 Hz to 200 Hz. The results show that due to a significant coupling effect of up-down direction boundaries on the sound field, the elastic structure can be equivalent to the point source only in low frequency and far field. The spatial field directivity distribution is more obvious at high frequency. The acoustic power measured by vertical line arrayis greatly influenced by ocean boundary and the depth of target.