The effect of reverberation on the damping of bubbles

The measurement of an acoustic emission, or scatter, from a bubble is not difficult. However, an accurate interpretation of that signal in terms of the bubble dynamics may require careful consideration. The study presented here is at first sight relatively simple: comparison of the predicted and measured quality factors of injected bubbles. While the measurement is normally done by monitoring the decay of passive emissions from a bubble, this technique becomes difficult with smaller bubbles. Therefore an active technique is introduced, which removes all the frequency-dependent effects on the measurement (such as transducer response) bar one. That, critically, is the effect of the change in the bubble resonance (frequency and damping) which results from the loading on the bubble due to the reverberant field. The vast majority of theoretical treatments of bubble acoustics assume free field conditions, yet the environmental conditions rarely if ever match these. Therefore measurements of bubble damping are compared both with the established free field theory, and with a new theory relevant to the prevailing reverberant conditions (whether caused by tank surfaces, monochromatic neighboring bubbles, or both). (C) 2002 Acoustical Society of America.