Evanescent acoustic waves: Production and scattering by resonant targets

Small targets with acoustic resonances which may be excited by incident acoustic planewaves are shown to possess high-Q modes ("organ-pipe" modes) which may be suitable for ocean-based calibration and ranging purposes. The modes are modeled using a double point-source model; this, along with acoustic reciprocity and inversion symmetry, is shown to adequately model the backscattering form functions of the modes at low frequencies. The backscattering form-functions are extended to apply to any bistatic acoustic experiment using the targets when the target response is dominated by the modes in question.;An interface between two fluids which each approximate an unbounded half-space has been produced in the laboratory. The fluids have different sound speeds. When sound is incident on this interface at beyond the critical angle from within the first fluid, the second fluid is made to evince a region dominated by evanescent acoustic energy. Such a system is shown to be an possible laboratory-based proxy for a flat sediment bottom in the ocean, or sloped (unrippled) bottom in littoral environments.;The evanescent sound field is characterized and shown to have complicated features despite the simplicity of its production. Notable among these features is the presence of dips in the soundfield amplitude, or "quasi-nulls". These are proposed to be extremely important when considering the return from ocean-based experiments. The soundfield features are also shown to be accurately predicted and characterized by wavenumber-integration software. The targets which exhibit organ-pipe modes in the free-field are shown to also be excited by the evanescent waves, and may be used as soundfield probes when the target returns are well characterized. Alternately, if the soundfield is well-known, the target parameters may be extracted from back- or bistatic-scattering experiments in evanescent fields. It is shown that the spatial decay rate as measured by a probe directly in the evanescent field is half that as measured by backscattering experiments on horizontal and vertical cylinders driven at the fundamental mode, and it is demonstrated that this is explained by the principle of acoustic reciprocity.