Duncan McGehee John A. Hildebrand Victor C. Anderson
Marine Phys. Lab., Scripps Inst. of Oceanogr., Univ. of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0205
The University of California, San Diego offers a one-year acoustics laboratory course to both undergraduate and graduate students. The lab is structured to parallel a graduate level theoretical acoustics class taught jointly by the electrical and computer engineering department, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The acoustics laboratory course examines fundamental principles of acoustics with emphasis on oceanographic applications. Also stressed are methods for handling random data and the professional reporting of results. A GPIB bus computer is used to control laboratory instrumentation, and students develop application programs for each experiment. The course is divided into 17 separate experiments. The first quarter is devoted to the measurement of mechanical impedance and resonance in a spring-mass system, velocity and dispersion in strings and bars, and normal modes in a bar. The second quarter examines the calibration of transducers, including self-reciprocity and beam-pattern measurements, reflection and transmission in multiple media, sound-speed dependence on salinity, and normal modes in a channel. The third quarter emphasizes the treatment of random data including: Power measurements of band-limited white noise, scattering of sound from surfaces of varying roughness, and detection threshold experiments.