A candidate mechanism for exciting sound during bubble coalescence.

Coalescing bubbles are known to produce a pulse of sound at the moment of coalescence, but the mechanism driving the sound production is uncertain. A candidate mechanism for the acoustic forcing is the rapid increase in the bubble volume, as the neck of air joining the two parent bubbles expands. A simple model is presented here for the volume forcing caused by the coalescence dynamics, and its predictions are tested against the available data. The model predicts the right order of magnitude for the acoustic amplitude, and the predicted amplitudes also scale correctly with the radius of the smaller parent bubble.