Modeling and Implementations of Non-explosive Electric Sparker Sources

Environmental adaptation is critical to the success of vital ASW missions. Environmental adaptation is particularly important for confident and effective multi-static active ASW in challenging littoral waters characterized by a high degree of uncertainty and variability. Acoustic sources are required to generate the transmission loss or reverberation needed for inversion of bottom properties. Non-explosive sources provide logistical and tactical benefits to the inversion, but they also introduce some computational challenges. Specifically, algorithms are needed for the processing (inversion) and implementation (deployment strategy) of the non-explosive sources for environmental adaptation. The Adaptive Methods team brings a wealth of experience and expertise in the areas of environmental adaptation, geoacoustic inversion, Air ASW operational concepts, and underwater acoustics. Building on prior research in related areas, the team will meet the following objectives in the Phase I research: 1) the specification of processing algorithms for inversion, using a baseline of concurrent inversion based on the Adaptive Simulated Annealing approach; 2) the specification of deployment algorithms, using a baseline of an initial sparse field concept; 3) an evaluation of the algorithms that is data-driven and based on tactical performance metrics; and 4) a comprehensive, integrated plan for deployment of the algorithms to the fleet.