Advanced Piezoelectric Materials in Maritime Surveillance Systems

Fundamentally, as demonstrated during the 1980’s, fixed surveillance arrays are extremely important to National Security by detecting enemy submarines at choke points and providing advanced tracking data allowing Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) assets to pick up and follow those contacts. The central issue is that, for some time now, sensor material advances in existing passive acoustic sensors systems has been essentially static. The promise of single crystal material innovations has not been realized and little has advanced in sensor designs themselves. The challenge requires an innovative but reasonably priced vector sensor that has increased sensitivity and a lower noise floor, while surviving deployment during cable laying operations and maintain the advanced performance at the extreme pressures experienced at the sea floor. The primary goal of this program is to demonstrate a new Textured Vector Sensor (TVS) in ruggedized packaging that is resilient to high hydrostatic pressures and delivering a significantly improved level of sensitivity (at minimum 6dB improvement with extended target of 12 dB over legacy vector sensors) performance via the advanced capabilities of TX101 textured materials and low-power, low-noise electronics.