Pressure Tolerant modular acoustic communication payload

The US Navy is actively supporting the development and procurement of multiple unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) to shift the fleet architecture to a more distributed format. UUV systems will play a key part in future Naval fleet architectures as new threats are identified and addressed. With the Navy’s goal to accelerate the acquisition of large UUVs there is a clear need for new technology development to support capability enhancement of autonomous underwater systems. The proposed effort aims to establish a new pressure tolerant acoustic communication system that leverages advanced power electronics, firmware, software and novel textured ceramic piezoelectric materials to present advancements in size, weight, and power (SWAP) capability for a wide range of unwater communication applications. QorTek’s overall approach is to develop a high-density, pressure tolerant, ACOMs platform that has broader capability (power, modularity, and reconfigurability) than currently available acoustic modems.  The proposed approach is to establish an electronics platform that is plug-and-play compatible with differing transducers and hydrophones addressing differing frequencies, bandwidths, and data rates. QorTek plans to leverage their open-architecture Wide Bandwidth Software Defined Acoustic Modem (WBSDAM) currently in development for DARPA as a baseline architecture for this effort. This foundation allows the electronics development effort to focus on design for pressure tolerance as functional hardware been demonstrated. The Phase II will mature a design for a highly compact, highly modular, payload based on QorTek’s Modular Direct Drive Amplifier, Digital Receiver and Software Defined Acoustic Modem architectures. The program will focus on modification of the designs to enable operation at depth without use of a pressure vessel with a goal to establish the feasibility of the approach though analytical modeling, design and early hardware demonstrations.