Research on the sediment acoustic properties based on a water coupled laboratory measurement system

Abstract

The high-frequency acoustic properties of seafloor sediments are very significant in seafloor study and underwater acoustic study field. In order to measure the sound speed and the attenuation for the small-scale sediment cores more accurately, this study developed a water coupled acoustic laboratory measurement system based on Richardson-Briggs technique. This method used the correlation comparison of waveforms received in sediment core and in identical reference tubes filled with water to measure sound speed and attenuation. The sound speed and attenuation of a clayey silt sediment sample were measured using the water coupled acoustic laboratory measurement system. This frequency dependence of the sound speed and attenuation showed that the clayey silt sediment has a weak positive sound speed dispersion, while the attenuation increases with a strong positive gradient within the measurement frequency range. This study also noted that the measured sound speed ratio match well with the empirical equations from literature. The measured attenuation factor data can fall in the Hamilton’s empirical prediction range.

Keywords:

• Sound speed
• attenuation
• marine sediments
• laboratory measurement

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Liu Xiaolei for his assistance of the sediment sampling, and Sun Zhiwen for his assistance of the acoustic measurement. We appreciate very much the remarks of the reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Financial supports from the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2018YFC0309202), the Director Fund of Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (No. QNLM201713), the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation, China (No. ZR2017BD031), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41706062, 41330965, 41406073, and 41676055), the Public Science and Technology Research Funds Projects of Ocean (No. 201405032), and the Taishan Scholar Project Funding (No. tspd20161007).