Synthetic Elements for Moving Line Arrays

The US Navy currently spends millions of dollars per year on consumable tapes to store acoustic sensor and track data during exercises and missions. These tapes are cumbersome and have a limited life in terms of read/write cycles. Tapes are typically recorded to only once. Tape drives are bulky and consume valuable space and power. In the future, reusable solid state devices (SSDs) will become so cost effective that they will supplant magnetic tape. These devices can be reused, which will result in cost savings. In addition, the use of these devices will improve the accessibility of data in support of US Navy R & D developmental efforts, and for combat system certification testing. In this Phase II SBIR work, Adaptive Methods and Blue Ridge Envisioneering propose to perform research and development in SSD technology. Forward-looking requirements for SSD technology, and for a recorder hardware and software architecture will be developed. High-speed hot-swappable SSD hardware will be designed, developed, integrated in an SSD-based Engineer Development Model variant of the Record and Playback Functional Segment of the AN/SQQ-89(V)15 combat system. The SSD hardware and software will be developed, benchmarked and demonstrated with oversight of the US Navy PEO IWS5 Data Recording Working Group.