THEORY OF SOUND-PROPAGATION IN SUSPENSIONS - A GUIDE TO PARTICLE-SIZEAND CONCENTRATION CHARACTERIZATION

There has been recent increasing interest in the acoustic properties o f suspensions for applications such as ultrasonic particle size and co ncentration instrumentation. This paper aims to summarize what is know n about the acoustic properties of suspensions of solids in a liquid a nd aims to identify the methods that enable useful information to be e xtracted from sound speed and attenuation information such as particle size, concentration, and the mechanical properties of the constituent s. The paper identifies regimes of sound propagation and present model s for these that can be used for size characterization of slurries.