Lee Kevin M, Wilson Preston S, Wochner Mark S
Applied Research Laboratories, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78713, USA.
AdBm Technologies, Austin, Texas 78756, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2017 Dec;142(6):3443. doi: 10.1121/1.5014052.
The ultimate goal of this work is to accurately predict the attenuation through a collection of large (on the order of 10-cm-radius) tethered encapsulated bubbles used in underwater noise abatement systems. Measurements of underwater sound attenuation were performed during a set of lake experiments, where a low-frequency compact electromechanical sound source was surrounded by different arrays of encapsulated bubbles with various individual bubbles sizes and void fractions. The measurements were compared with an existing predictive model [Church, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 1510-1521 (1995)] of the dispersion relation for linear propagation in liquid containing encapsulated bubbles. Although the model was originally intended to describe ultrasound contrast agents, it is evaluated here for large bubbles, and hence low frequencies, as a design tool for future underwater noise abatement systems, and there is good quantitative agreement between the observations and the model.
