Pressure waves in bubbly liquids

Abstract

It is well known that sound propagation in liquid media is strongly affected by the presence of gas bubbles that interact with sound and in turn affect the medium. An explicit form of a wave equation in a bubbly liquid medium was obtained in this study. Using the linearized wave equation and the Keller-Miksis equation for bubble wall motion, a dispersion relation for the linear pressure wave propagation in bubbly liquids was obtained. It was found that attenuation of the waves in bubbly liquid occurs due to the viscosity and the heat transfer from/to the bubble. In particular, at the lower frequency region, the thermal diffusion has a considerable affect on the frequencydependent attenuation coefficients. The phase velocity and the attenuation coefficient obtained from the dispersion relation are in good agreement with the observed values in all sound frequency ranges from kHz to MHz.