Understanding air‐gun bubble behavior

Abstract

An air‐gun bubble behaves approximately as a spherical bubble of an ideal gas in an infinite volume of practically incompressible water. With this simplification, the equation of bubble motion and its far‐field signature is more understandable than with the more exact theory commonly cited in the literature. The terms of the equation of bubble motion are explained using elementary physics and mathematics, computation of numerical results is outlined, and an example signature is shown. An air‐gun bubble is analogous to a simple harmonic oscillator consisting of a mass on a spring, with an equivalent mass equal three times that of the water displaced by the bubble, and air pressure following an ideal gas law corresponding to a spring. With this understanding, one is prepared to deal with the effects of interactions among air guns and with the higher‐order terms and other features that must be included to model the air‐gun signature of actual seismic source arrays.