SEAWATER BREAKDOWN AND BUBBLE GENERATION IN MARINE SPARKER BASED SOUND SOURCES

摘要

A model is proposed for the behaviour of sparkers, which are commonly used as marine sound sources. The electrical discharge in seawater is modeled by a set of equations describing the process of Joule heating for a sphere-sphere electrode geometry. The equations account for a finite available electrostatic energy stored in the source capacitor. The nonlinear equations governing the temperature and the electric potential in the liquid are implemented numerically using a finite difference scheme, and solved with an iterative method. Numerical simulations of the discharge confirm the recently proposed hypothesis of dependence of breakdown and bubble generation on the dissipated energy and not on field strength. The comparison of these simulations with experimental data generally shows a good agreement.