What is it about?
Heterogeneous materials may be composed of discrete features embedded in a host medium, for example, plums in a pudding. Another kind of heterogeneous material can be formed by materials which partially mix, so that there is no clear boundary between the host and heterogeneities, for example whipped cream partially folded into a mousse. This is termed a continuum. This paper develops a remote-sensing method (i.e., without having to directly sample the medium) to determine whether the heterogeneities in a given material are of a continuum or discrete nature.
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Why is it important?
The method can be applied to a wide variety of materials. Here it is applied to marine sediments where little is understand about the characteristics of heterogeneities across a wide range of scales. Understanding these scales can be useful for insight into mechanisms that cause scattering of acoustic energy in the ocean as well as geologic processes, and biologic communities.
Perspectives
The research that led to this article greatly clarified some of the observations we have made of scattering scattering from the seabed. We expect that it might be useful across a broad range of disciplines and applications (including industrial applications).
Dr Charles Holland
Pennsylvania State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Discrimination between discrete and continuum scattering from the sub-seafloor, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, August 2015, Acoustical Society of America (ASA),
DOI: 10.1121/1.4923451.
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