Subsurface acoustic ducts in the Northern California current system.

This study investigates the subsurface sound channel or acoustic duct that appears seasonally along the U.S. Pacific Northwest coast below the surface mixed layer. The duct has a significant impact on sound propagation at mid-frequencies by trapping sound energy and reducing transmission loss within the channel. A survey of the sound-speed profiles obtained from archived mooring and glider observations reveals that the duct is more prevalent in summer to fall than in winter to spring and offshore of the shelf break than over the shelf. The occurrence of the subsurface duct is typically associated with the presence of a strong halocline and a reduced thermocline or temperature inversion. Furthermore, the duct observed over the shelf slope corresponds to a vertically sheared along-slope velocity profile, characterized by equatorward near-surface flow overlaying poleward subsurface flow. Two potential duct formation mechanisms are examined in this study, which are seasonal surface heat exchange and baroclinic advection of distinct water masses. The former mechanism regulates the formation of a downward-refracting sound-speed gradient that caps the duct near the sea surface, while the latter contributes to the formation of an upward-refracting sound-speed gradient that defines the duct's lower boundary.

Reverberation due to a moving, narrowband source in an ocean waveguide.

In this paper, a model for the bistatic reverberation associated with seafloor scattering of sound from a moving, narrowband source in an ocean waveguide is developed. Studies of the Doppler effect for moving sources in waveguides have typically focused on the forward propagating field where the Doppler shift leads to a splitting or broadening of the received spectrum. In contrast, the contributions to the scattered field come from all directions and as a consequence the spectrum of the received energy is spread across the entire range of Doppler-shifted frequencies possible for the speed of the source. The model developed here uses rays for the incident field, ray-mode analogies for the scattering, and normal modes to propagate the scattered field to the receiver. Results from this model are compared with data collected using a towed source during the Target and Reverberation Experiment 2013. The possible applications of this Doppler reverberation for seafloor characterization are also considered.

Attenuation of sound in sand sediments due to porosity fluctuations.

At high frequencies, the attenuation measured in sand sediments is larger than that predicted by Biot theory. To account for this discrepancy, perturbation theory is used to incorporate losses due to scattering by porosity variations into both Biot's poroelastic equations and the effective density fluid model. While previous results showed that fluctuations in the bulk frame modulus were insufficient to produce significant attenuation in a sand sediment, modest levels of fluctuations in the porosity produce significant scattering loss. By using the sediment parameters and the heterogeneity power spectrum measured during the Sediment Acoustics Experiment in 2004, the perturbation theory result shows good agreement with the sound speed and attenuation data without any free parameters.

Modeling interface roughness scattering in a layered seabed for normal-incident chirp sonar signals.

Downward looking sonar, such as the chirp sonar, is widely used as a sediment survey tool in shallow water environments. Inversion of geo-acoustic parameters from such sonar data precedes the availability of forward models. An exact numerical model is developed to initiate the simulation of the acoustic field produced by such a sonar in the presence of multiple rough interfaces. The sediment layers are assumed to be fluid layers with non-intercepting rough interfaces.

Acoustic propagation from a spiral wave front source in an ocean environment.

A spiral wave front source generates a pressure field that has a phase that depends linearly on the azimuthal angle at which it is measured. This differs from a point source that has a phase that is constant with direction. The spiral wave front source has been developed for use in navigation; however, very little work has been done to model this source in an ocean environment. To this end, the spiral wave front analogue of the acoustic point source is developed and is shown to be related to the point source through a simple transformation. This makes it possible to transform the point source solution in a particular ocean environment into the solution for a spiral source in the same environment. Applications of this transformation are presented for a spiral source near the ocean surface and seafloor as well as for the more general case of propagation in a horizontally stratified waveguide.

A spiral wave front beacon for underwater navigation: transducer prototypes and testing.

Transducers for acoustic beacons which can produce outgoing signals with wave fronts whose horizontal cross sections are circular or spiral are studied experimentally. A remote hydrophone is used to determine its aspect relative to the transducers by comparing the phase of the circular signal to the phase of the spiral signal. The transducers for a "physical-spiral" beacon are made by forming a strip of 1-3 piezocomposite transducer material around either a circular or spiral backing. A "phased-spiral" beacon is made from an array of transducer elements which can be driven either in phase or staggered out of phase so as to produce signals with either a circular or spiral wave front. Measurements are made to study outgoing signals and their usefulness in determining aspect angle. Vertical beam width is also examined and phase corrections applied when the hydrophone is out of the horizontal plane of the beacon. While numerical simulations indicate that the discontinuity in the physical-spiral beacon introduces errors into the measured phase, damping observed at the ends of the piezocomposite material is a more significant source of error. This damping is also reflected in laser Doppler vibrometer measurements of the transducer's surface velocity.

A spiral wave front beacon for underwater navigation: basic concept and modeling.

A spiral wave front source produces an acoustic field that has a phase that is proportional to the azimuthal angle about the source. The concept of a spiral wave front beacon is developed by combining this source with a reference source that has a phase that is constant with the angle. The phase difference between these sources contains information about the receiver's azimuthal angle relative to the beacon and can be used for underwater navigation. To produce the spiral wave front, two sources are considered: a "physical-spiral" source, which produces the appropriate phase by physically deforming the active element of the source into a spiral, and a "phased-spiral" source, which uses an array of active elements, each driven with the appropriate phase, to produce the spiral wave front. Using finite element techniques, the fields produced by these sources are examined in the context of the spiral wave front beacon, and the advantages of each source are discussed.

Dispersion and attenuation due to scattering from heterogeneities of the frame bulk modulus of a poroelastic medium.

While Biot theory can successfully account for the dispersion observed in sand sediments, the attenuation at high frequencies has been observed to increase more rapidly than Biot theory would predict. In an effort to account for this additional loss, perturbation theory is applied to Biot's poroelastic equations to model the loss due to the scattering of energy from heterogeneities in the sediment. A general theory for propagation loss is developed and applied to a medium with a randomly varying frame bulk modulus. The theory predicts that these heterogeneities produce an overall softening of the medium as well as scattering of energy from the mean fast compressional wave into incoherent fast and slow compressional waves. This theory is applied to two poroelastic media: a weakly consolidated sand sediment and a consolidated sintered glass bead pack. The random variations in the frame modulus do not have significant effects on the propagation through the sand sediment but do play an important role in the propagation through the consolidated medium.

Analysis of flavonol aglycones and terpenelactones in Ginkgo biloba extract: A comparison of high-performance thin-layer chromatography and column high-performance liquid chromatography.

Advancements in automated high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC) have made it feasible to assess its use for the quantitative analysis of marker compounds in botanical preparations. We report here the findings of method comparisons for the terpenelactones and flavonol aglycones by column high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with evaporative light scattering and UV detection, and HPTLC with a scanning densitometer. For the HPTLC assay of terpenelactones, total bilobalide, ginkgolide A, and ginkgolide B consistently achieved <70% of the total determined using HPLC, regardless of variations to postchromatographic derivatization time and temperature. Accuracy testing showed the possibility of a matrix interference. In contrast, a good relationship (95%) was determined between HPTLC and HPLC for determination of total flavonol glycosides (calculated from combined quercetin, kaempferol, and isorhamnetin) from an acid-hydrolyzed Ginkgo biloba L. (GBE) sample. The HPTLC flavonol aglycone method also performed well in terms of accuracy (overall average of 96% recovery for the 3 aglycones) and consecutive plate repeatability (overall percent relative standard deviation of 4.4). It is demonstrated that HPTLC can be a time-saving complement to HPLC for routine analysis of the flavonol glycosides in GBE.