High Gain Array of Velocity Sensors

Most production sonobuoys are packaged in air-deployable, A-sized housings and are used as free-floating passive acoustic sensors. They provide good detection capability in a wide range of noise and threat conditions, but there are noise environments where improved detection capability is desirable. To provide the improved detection, new designs are needed that take advantage of velocity or vector sensor elements, line arrays, and enhanced processing to provide the capability of array gains of at least 24 dB for a variety of noise and threat environments. This new sonobuoy should have the capability to operate in both shallow and deep water. Due to the high array gain that is required, a limited bandwidth of 500 to 1000 Hz will be considered. SeaLandAire proposes a line array of compass-corrected vector sensor elements as a baseline design to achieve a gain of 24 dB. The baseline design uses an existing miniature DIFAR hydrophone design for the sensing elements. Trade studies will be conducted in Phase I to evolve the baseline design to optimize performance. Beamforming will play a pivotal role in the trade studies. Trade parameters include; cost, packaging volume, number of elements, reliability, array length, power, deployment, array angle, etc.