A model for passive underwater noise suppression by bubble curtains surrounding point or line sources in shallow water

Abstract

Underwater noise generated by pile driving, rotating machinery, or towers supporting offshore wind turbines may disturb marine life and inhibit detection of coastal activities via passive sonar and seismic sensors. Noise abatement techniques have therefore been proposed to limit the propagation of such noise into the far field, and many of these employ a curtain of freely-rising bubbles or tethered encapsulated bubbles to surround the towers [Lee et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 131, 3507(A) (2012)]. An analytic model, based on a Green's function approach, is presented for the passive noise suppression provided by a discrete number of bubbles surrounding submerged point sources or pulsating cylindrical towers above horizontally-stratified layers of sediment. The sediment layers are modeled as viscoelastic media and the Green's function is derived via angular spectrum decomposition [Hay et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 129, 2477(A), (2011)]. Simulations in which the bubbles are assumed to react independently to the incident field will be compared to those in which bubble-bubble interaction is taken into account. The effects of bubble size distributions and void fractions on noise suppression will be investigated for different source configurations. [This work was supported by the Department of Energy under Grant DE-EE0005380.]