A review of the scattering properties of suspended sandy sediments for the application of acoustics to sediment transport studies

Thorne, P. D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4261-0937; Meral, R. 2008 A review of the scattering properties of suspended sandy sediments for the application of acoustics to sediment transport studies. In: Proceedings of the 9th European conference on underwater acoustics: ECUA 2008, organised in the framework of the Acoustics '08 Paris conference, Paris, France, June 29th - July 4th 2008. Paris. France, Societe Francaise d'Acoustique, 645-650.

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Abstract/Summary

Multi-frequency acoustics backscattering has been used for over a decade, to quantitatively measure, in the marine environment, near-bed profiles of suspended sediment particle size and concentration. Central to obtaining the sediment parameters from the backscattered signal, is a description of the scattering properties of irregularly shaped particles randomly distributed in space. Formulations are therefore required for both the attenuation and backscattering properties of suspensions of sedimentary particles with size and acoustic frequency. There is no rigorous analytical solution or single formulation for these scattering properties and different researchers have used somewhat different expressions. Here we bring together four decades of published data on the acoustic scattering properties of suspensions of sandy sediments. These data are reformulated in terms of the usual acoustic scattering nomenclature, that is the form function and the normalised total scattering cross-section and simple heuristic generic expressions, based on a sphere scattering model, are formulated to describe the sediment scattering properties. The expressions are not limited to sand particles, but should have broad applicability to irregularly shaped particle scattering.

Item Type:	Publication - Conference Item (Paper)
Programmes:	Oceans 2025 > Shelf and coastal processes
NORA Subject Terms:	Marine Sciences
Date made live:	16 Feb 2009 11:09 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/5426

Item Type:

Publication - Conference Item (Paper)

Programmes:

Oceans 2025 > Shelf and coastal processes

NORA Subject Terms:

Marine Sciences

Date made live:

16 Feb 2009 11:09 +0 (UTC)

URI:

https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/5426