Nonlinear dynamics of a gas bubble in an incompressible elastic medium.

A nonlinear model in the form of the Rayleigh-Plesset equation is developed for a gas bubble in an essentially incompressible elastic medium such as a tissue or rubberlike medium. Two constitutive laws for the elastic medium are considered: the Mooney potential, and Landau's expansion of the strain energy density. These two constitutive laws are compared at quadratic order to obtain a relation between their respective elastic constants. Attention is devoted to the relative importance of shear stress on the bubble dynamics, allowing for the equilibrium gas pressure in the bubble to differ substantially from the pressure at infinity. The model for the bubble motion is approximated to quadratic order to assess the importance of shear stress in the surrounding medium relative to that of the gas pressure in the bubble. Relations are derived for the value of the shear wave speed at which the two contributions are comparable, which provide an assessment of when shear stress in the surrounding medium must be taken into account when modeling bubble dynamics.