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 I will establish a preliminary design for a highly compact, highly modular, payload based on QorTek’s Modular Multi-Level 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.