A systematic study of water-filled submerged elastic spherical shells and the resolution of elastic- and water-included resonances

Water-filled elastic shells present more complicated backscattered echoes when compared to evacuated shells and are less well understood. The objective here is to determine and explain features peculiar to such objects and to use these features to aid in object characterization. Towards that end, an acoustic background suitable for such targets in conjunction with residual partial wave analysis obtained from subtracting the background from the elastic response is used. This analysis is aided by the determination and comparison of plate modes and resonance locations of evacuated unloaded, evacuated loaded, and loaded water-filled shells. Analysis of water-filled shells suggests that there exist isolated narrow, uniformly spaced eigenmodes in addition to the elastic modes. The broader elastic modes appear split in comparison to their unloaded counterparts. Otherwise, the elastic modes are not greatly affected by the included eigenmodes. The isolated (included) eigenmodes are extremely well modeled by a water inclusion in an infinite elastic matrix composed of the elastic shell material. The splitting of elastic modes proves to be due to interference of the included eigenmodes and the elastic body resonances. This leads to what appear to be separate branches of dispersion curves related to the elastic modes. Because of the numerous and usually evenly spaced included eigenmodes, dispersion curves are dominated by the abundance of these modes. A clear picture of the physical processes emerges from this analysis that explains all features of this event. Simple sets of rules that lead to tractable calculations are introduced that facilitate analysis of this interesting physical process. © 2002 Acoustical Society of America.