• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.28 no.1
• /
• pp.10-18
• /
• 2009

A moving surface vessel generates a ship wake which contains a cloud of micro-bubbles with radii ranging between $8{\sim}200{\mu}m$. Such micro-bubbles can be detected by active sonar system for more than ten minutes depending on the size and speed of the surface vessel. In this paper, a reverberation model for the ship wake is presented. The developed model consists of the acoustic scattering model due to the distribution of the micro-bubbles and the kinematic model for the moving active sonar. The acoustic scattering model is based on the volume integration, where the volume scattering strengths are obtained from the spatial distribution of micro-bubbles. Since the directivity and look-direction of active sonar are important factors for moving active sonar, the kinematic model utilizes the Euler transformation to obtain the relative motion between the global and local coordinates. In order to verify the developed model, a series of sea experiment was executed in September 2007 to obtain the spatial-temporal distribution of a bubble cloud, and analyzed to be compared with the simulation results.