On the possibility of single-frequency acoustic measurement of sand and clay concentrations in uniform suspensions

There are fluvial, estuarine, and coastal environments in which the size distribution of suspended sediment is sometimes bi-modal, with one narrow peak in the size range of clay and the other narrow peak in the size range of sand. In such situations it is possible to exploit the acoustic scattering and dissipation properties of the water-sediment mixture to estimate the concentration of the two different size suspended sediment constituents using the measured backscatter from a single frequency transceiver. While it may seem counter-intuitive that the backscatter from a single frequency could be utilized to estimate the concentrations of two different size fractions, the dominance of the clay to sound attenuation and the sand to sound back-scattering can be usefully exploited under unusual conditions where the characteristic sizes of the two sediment fractions are approximately known, and the concentrations of the clay and sand are homogeneous along the acoustic sound path.