Precursors in gas-liquid mixtures

Two types of precursors propagating at the speed of sound in a pure liquid have been revealed in the experiments on the evolution of pressure pulses in a gas-liquid mixture; at the same time, the main pressure pulse propagates at a low equilibrium speed of sound and its evolution is described by the Burgers–Korteweg–de Vries equation. The first high-frequency precursor is a complete analog of a classical Sommerfeld precursor, because the resonance dispersion equation for a bubble mixture coincides with that for insulators in the Lorentz model, and oscillates at a frequency close to the “plasma frequency”. The second low-frequency precursor has been revealed in this work. The frequency of the low-frequency precursor is close to the resonance frequency of pulsations of bubbles, which is almost an order of magnitude lower than the frequency of the high-frequency precursor. The low-frequency precursor has a much larger amplitude of pulsations and smaller damping and is not described within the homogeneous model of the gas-liquid mixture. The observed phenomenon of low-frequency precursors has been explained within a simple heterogeneous model of a bubble liquid.