Theory for acoustic propagation in solid containing gas bubbles, with applications to marine sediment and tissue

Abstract

Whilst there is a considerable body of work in the literature on the theory of acoustic propagation in marine sediment, the incorporation of gas bubbles into such theories is done with the inclusion of assumptions which severely limit the applicability of those models to practical gas-laden marine sediments.Following an Introduction (section 1), section 2 develops a theory appropriate for predicting the acoustically-driven dynamics of a single spherical gas bubble embedded in an incompressible lossy elastic solid. Use of this theory to calculate propagation parameters requires calculation of the gas pressure component of section 2, and the options are outlined in section 3, with the implications for the description of dissipation. This leads to a discussion in section 4 into further of how dissipation enters the description, and in section 5 how the entire scheme can be incorporated into a propagation model