Estimation and Measurement of Forward Propagated Ultrasonic Fields in Layered Fluid Media

The forward propagated ultrasonic fields resulting from a circular plane or a concave transducer in layered fluid media as well as in homogeneous water are theoretically estimated by the angular spectrum method(ASMJ) combined with Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction theory(RSDT), and measured by a precision 3-D scanning system with a needle-point hydrophone. To make the aliasing error negligible on the 2-D FFT in the theoretical estimation, the spatial discretization in the ASM are carefully considered for optimal selection of spatial sampling intervals and the size of discretization area. It is shown that the estimated fields agree reasonably with the measured ones.