Guillermo Gaunaurd
Naval Surface Warfare Ctr., Dahlgren Div., White Oak Detachment, R-34, Silver Spring, MD 20903-5640
Some of my early (1977--80) contributions on resonance scattering as they applied to the three disciplines in the title will be reviewed. Of main interest was the splitting of the partial waves that make up the sonar cross sections (SCS) of any object into the two interacting portions denoted ``backgrounds'' and ``resonances.'' This early work was first presented by H. Uberall, and by myself, in two separate lectures, in a 1977 IUTAM Congress on Elastic Wave Propagation in Chicago. This identical work was later published in two JASA articles [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 63, 723--731, 1699--1712 (1978)]. This process of so splitting the SCS, and an analogous one in radar were patented by myself in 1980 on behalf of the Navy, and received much publicity in the secular press. By 1981 there were dozens of articles out on the subject [summarized in: L. Flax, G. Gaunaurd, and H. Uberall, Physical Acoustics (Academic, New York, 1981), Vol. 15, Chap. 3] and by the end of the decade there were hundreds (see an overview in: G. Gaunaurd, Appl. Mech. Rev. 42, 143 (1989)]. Today, although substantially modified from its primitive form, the approach still attracts the interest of researchers, and yet, it has not triggered any Naval Program, and possible reasons for this outcome are conjectured. [Work supported by the NSWC/DD's IR Program and the ONR.]