Critical Role of a Nanometer-Scale Microballoon Shell on Bulk Acoustic Properties of Doped Soft Matter.

A material's acoustic properties depend critically upon porosity. Doping a soft material with gas-filled microballoons permits a controlled variation of the porosity through a scalable fabrication process while generating well-tailored spherical cavities that are impermeable to liquids. However, evidence is lacking of how the nanometer-scale polymeric shell contributes to the overall effective material properties in the regime where the wavelength is comparable to the sample thickness. Here, we measure ultrasound transmission through a microballoon-doped soft material as a function of microballoon and impurity concentration, sample thickness, and frequency. The measured longitudinal wave speeds are an order of magnitude larger than those in similar systems where no shell is present, while the transverse wave speed is found to linearly increase with microballoon concentration, also in contrast to systems with no shell. Furthermore, we find the results are independent of the soft material's elastic moduli as well as a lesser contribution of the microballoon shell on material attenuation. The results are validated with a multiple scattering model and suggest the shell contributes significantly to the material's bulk acoustic properties despite its thickness being 4 orders of magnitude smaller than the acoustic wavelength. Our results demonstrate how a nanometer-scale interface between a gas cavity and a soft polymer can be used in the submicrometer design of acoustic materials, and are important for observations of such phenomena as strong interference effects in soft matter.

Demonstration of a quasi-monostatic autonomous underwater vehicle based high duty cycle active sonar.

The feasibility of resolving target returns within receive signals collected by a continuously transmitting quasi-monostatic, broadband, autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) based sonar is explored. Theoretical studies supported by experimental results suggest that it is possible to capture the source-to-receiver coupling response and target scattering with sufficient fidelity during the continuous transmission to enable detection and (potentially) classification processing. Demonstrations focused upon the detection of a bottomed target object at sea using transmit signals with duty cycles of 60% and 100% indicate that such an approach is feasible for a representative AUV-based side looking sonar system operating in shallow water.

Experimental estimation of in vacuo structural admittance using random sources in a non-anechoic room.

Identification of unexploded ordinance buried in the sediment in the littoral waters throughout the world is a problem of great concern. When illuminated by low-frequency sonar some of these targets exhibit an elastic response that can be used to identify them. This elastic behavior is embodied and identified by a quantity called the in vacuo structural admittance matrix Ys, a relationship between the sonar-induced forces and resulting vibration on its surface. When it is known it can be combined with surface impedances to predict the three-dimensional bistatic scattering in any fluid-like media and for any burial state (depth and orientation). At the heart of this is the measurement of Ys and it is demonstrated in this paper that this can be accomplished by studying the target in a simple (acoustically unaltered) in-air laboratory environment. The target chosen in this study is a thick spherical shell that was illuminated by a nearly spatially isotropic array of remote loudspeakers. Ys is constructed from ensemble averages of the cross-correlations of eight collocated accelerometers and microphones placed on the surface of the object. The structural admittance determined from the data showed excellent agreement with theory.

Acoustic identification of buried underwater unexploded ordnance using a numerically trained classifier (L).

Using a finite element-based structural acoustics code, simulations were carried out for the acoustic scattering from an unexploded ordnance rocket buried in the sediment under 3 m of water. The simulation treated 90 rocket burial angles in steps of 2°. The simulations were used to train a generative relevance vector machine (RVM) algorithm for identifying rockets buried at unknown angles in an actual water/sediment environment. The trained RVM algorithm was successfully tested on scattering measurements made in a sediment pool facility for six buried targets including the rocket at 90°, 120°, and 150°, a boulder, a cinderblock, and a cinderblock rolled 45° about its long axis.

Discriminating resonant targets from clutter using Lanczos iterated single-channel time reversal.

Power iterated single-channel time-reversal is extended to employ Lanczos iterations. The properties of these algorithms are studied in the presence of varying levels of noise and broadband clutter. It is shown the Lanczos iterated method possesses superior convergence properties in comparison to the standard power iterated technique. Results demonstrate that such algorithms provide an efficient means through which to isolate and extract the properties of resonant scatterers in the presence of noise and coherent interference.

Isolating scattering resonances of an air-filled spherical shell using iterative, single-channel time reversal.

Iterative, single-channel time reversal is employed to isolate backscattering resonances of an air-filled spherical shell in a frequency range of 0.5-20 kHz. Numerical simulations of free-field target scattering suggest improved isolation of the dominant target response frequency in the presence of varying levels of stochastic noise, compared to processing returns from a single transmission and also coherent averaging. To test the efficacy of the technique in a realistic littoral environment, monostatic scattering experiments are conducted in the Gulf of Mexico near Panama City, Florida. The time reversal technique is applied to returns from a hollow spherical shell target sitting proud on a sandy bottom in 14 m deep water. Distinct resonances in the scattering response of the target are isolated, depending upon the bandwidth of the sonar system utilized.

Sensing a buried resonant object by single-channel time reversal.

Scaled laboratory experiments are conducted to assess the efficacy of iterative, single-channel time reversal for enhancement of monostatic returns from resonant spheres in the free field and buried in a sediment phantom. Experiments are performed in a water tank using a broad-band piston transducer operating between 0.4 and 1.5 MHz and calibrated using free surface reflections. Solid and hollow metallic spheres, 6.35 mm in diameter, are buried in a consolidation of 128-microm-mean- diameter spherical glass beads. The procedure consists of exciting the target object with a broadband pulse, sampling the return using a finite time window, reversing the signal in time, and using this reversed signal as the source waveform for the next interrogation. Results indicate that the spectrum of the returns rapidly converges to the dominant mode in the backscattering response of the target. Signal-to-noise enhancement of the target echo is demonstrated for a target at several burial depths. Images generated by scanning the transducer over the location of multiple buried targets demonstrate the ability of the technique to distinguish between targets of differing type and to yield an enhancement of different modes within the response of a single target as a function of transducer position and processing bandwidth.