B. K. Choi
H. R. Lee
S. W. Yoon
Dept. of Phys., Sung Kyun Kwan Univ., Suwon 440-746, Republic of Korea
Bubbles are well known to induce variations of acoustic characteristics in water. The bubble size distribution gives significant information for understanding underwater sound propagation and acoustic roles of bubbles in the ocean. Since the conventional acoustic bubble sizing method only considered sound attenuation due to bubbles around resonance frequencies in a bubbly mixture, a bubble size distribution was incoherently estimated. In the present coherent acoustic bubble sizing method, sound speed as well as sound attenuation are considered to have a coherent estimation of bubble size distribution in the bubbly mixture. The present coherent method is proved to describe a bubble size distribution more accurately than the conventional incoherent one. [Work supported by the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation.]