Theoretical Study of Coherent Acoustic Inverse Method for Bubble Sizing in Bubbly Water

The bubble size distribution is critical information to understand sound propagation and ambient noise in the ocean. To estimate the bubble size distribution in a bubbly water, the sound attenuation has been only in the conventional acoustic bubble sizing method without considering the sound speed variation. However, the effect of the sound speed variation in bubbly water cannot be neglected because of its compressibility variation. The sound attenuation is also affected by the sound speed variation. In this paper, a coherent acoustic bubble sizing inverse technique is introduced as a new bubble sizing technique with considering sound speed variation as well as the sound attenuation. This coherent sizing method is theoretically verified with the bubble distribution functions of single-size, Gaussian, and power-law functions. Its numerical test results with the coherent acoustic bubble sizing method show good agreement with the given bubble distributions.