Engineering Sensors for Towed Array Reliability

Submarine thin-line Towed Arrays are subjected to extreme forces during deployment and retrieval in addition to tactical operations. These forces are generally significantly different in nature. In the past it has been especially difficult to monitor and characterize the stress imparted on the array during the deployment and retrieval cycles. To significantly improve Towed Array availability an objective systems engineering process must be implemented to analyze these events and develop a solution. The goal of the systems engineering team is to generate an open systems architecture that will enable the monitoring of towed array health during all modes of operation including the handling cycles. The evolution of modern network technology has enabled state of the art telemetry systems such as 3 Phoenix"s iPON Telemetry, to perform sophisticated real time Performance Monitoring and Fault Localization (PMFL). These tasks are executed on a continuous basis transporting data from specifically designed engineering sensors to support the adaptive reconfiguration of the telemetry system in the event of failures enabling localization of the failures within the array. The focus of this topic is to develop an engineering sensor capability for thin-line submarine towed arrays that will provide objective information that can be utilized in real-time in conjunction with the telemetry network and its associated control processor. The demonstration system proposed in this Phase I will provide the capability to monitor the health of the towed array handling system as well as the health of the towed array data network during all modes of operation. 3 Phoenix, Inc. (3Pi) will build upon existing SBIR and STTR developments to further enhance the PMFL capabilities of thinline towed array systems.