Sediment classification of the sea floor using the Chirp Sonar and the Biot model.

摘要

A new method is proposed to infer the geotechnical properties of the sea floor from its response to the frequency-modulated pulses emitted by the subbottom profiler called Chirp Sonar. The environment is assumed to be a multilayered medium, composed of homogeneous layers, or an inhomogeneous half-space with depth-dependent properties. The acoustic response of the sediment is computed using the Biot-Stoll theory. The Levenberg-Marquardt method is applied to fit the synthetic response to the experimental response of an homogeneous layer overlying the sea floor. The porosity, the permeability, the mean grain diameter, the mass density, the bulk modulus and the shear modulus within this sediment layer can be estimated. A multilayered medium with depth-dependent properties could be applied to this inversion technique in the future.