The Relationship of Cavitation to the Negative Acoustic Pressure Amplitude in Ultrasonic Therapy

The relationship between the cavitation and acoustic peak negative pressure in the high-intensity focused ultrasound （HIFU） field is analyzed in water and tissue phantom. The peak negative pressure at the focus is determined by a hybrid approach combining the measurement with the simulation. The spheroidal beam equation is utilized to describe the nonlinear acoustic propagation. The waveform at the focus is measured by a fiber optic probe hydrophone in water. The relationship between the source pressure amplitude and the excitation voltage is determined by fitting the measured ratio of the second harmonic to the fundamental component at the focus, based on the model simulation. Then the focal negative pressure is calculated for arbitrary voltage excita- tion in water and tissue phantom. A portable B-mode ultrasound scanner is applied to monitor HIFU-indueed cavitation in real time, and a passive cavitation detection （PCD） system is used to acquire the bubble scattering signals in the HIFU focal volume for the cavitation quantification. The results show that： （1） unstable cavitation starts to appear in degassed water when the peak negative pressure of HIFU signals reaches 13.5 MPa; and （2） the cavitation activity can be detected in tissue phantom by B-mode images and in the PCD system with HIFU peak negative pressures of 9.0 MPa and 7.8 MPa, respectively, which suggests that real-time B-mode images could be used to monitor the cavitation activity in two dimensions, while PCD systems are more sensitive to detect scattering and emission signals from cavitation bubbles.

Theoretical and Experimental Study on the Acoustic Wave Energy After the Nonlinear Interaction of Acoustic Waves in Aqueous Media

Based on the Burgers equation and Manley-Rowe equation, the derivation about nonlinear interaction of the acoustic waves has been done in this paper. After nonlinear interaction among the low-frequency weak waves and the pump wave, the analytical solutions of acoustic waves＇ amplitude in the field are deduced. The relationship between normalized energy of high-frequency and the change of acoustic energy before and after the nonlinear interaction of the acoustic waves is analyzed. The experimental results about the changes of the acoustic energy are presented. The study shows that new frequencies are generated and the energies of the low-frequency are modulated in a long term by the pump waves, which leads the energies of the low-frequency acoustic waves to change in the pulse trend in the process of the nonlinear interaction of the acoustic waves. The increase and decrease of the energies of the low-frequency are observed under certain typical conditions, which lays a foundation for practical engineering applications.

Spatial diversity and combination technology using amplitude and phase weighting method for phase-coherent underwater acoustic communications

The UWA channel is characterized as a time-dispersive rapidly fading channel, which in addition exhibits Doppler instabilities and limited bandwidth. To eliminate inter- symbol interference caused by multipath propagation, spatial diversity equalization is the main technical means. The paper combines the passive phase conjugation and spatial processing to maximize the output array gain. It uses signal-to-noise-plus-interference to evaluate the quality of signals received at different channels. The amplitude of signal is weighted using Sigmoid function. Second order PLL can trace the phase variation caused by channel, so the signal can be accumulated in the same phase. The signals received at different channels need to be normal- ized. It adopts fractional-decision feedback diversity equalizer （FDFDE） and achieves diversity equalization by using different channel weighted coefficients. The simulation and lake trial data processing results show that, the optimized diversity receiving equalization algorithm can im- prove communication system＇s ability in tracking the change of underwater acoustic channel, offset the impact of multipath and noise and improve the performance of communication system. The performance of the communication receiving system is better than that of the equal gain combination. At the same time, the bit error rate （BER） reduces 1.8%.