Award Data

Safe and reliable launch and recovery of small offboard assets is important to the concept of operations for the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), as they are deployed to complete a wide range of missions. The LCS design specification requires launch and recovery of watercraft to be completed within fifteen minutes in conditions through Sea State 4. These operations are expected to be difficult becaus ...

The propagation of acoustic signatures from vehicles, aircraft, boats and artillery can have a significant impact on military operations. Specifically combatants need to reliably detect enemy acoustic signatures while at the same time concealing their own. The physical propagation environment, including surface and atmospheric parameters, may drastically alter the range at which an emitting object ...

Active sonar clutter usually appears on a display as an amalgamation of point scatterers that exhibit both object and individual reflective and kinematic behavior. We propose to demonstrate the feasibility of constructing a realistic active sonar clutter model based on a few generalized concepts to synthesize most clutter types observed on Mid-Frequency active sonars. Realism is achieved by using ...

Experimental and computational studies have indicated the benefits of fish swimming propulsion for efficiency and fast maneuvering capability. The biological paradigm of using unsteady body motion to generate and manipulate flow vorticity for desired hydrodynamic thrust marks a shift from the quasi-steady treatments used in practice for the engineering of vehicle hydrodynamics. A key component to ...

Applied Physical Sciences Corp. (APS) will develop a deployable marine mammal mitigation system. The system will use vector hydrophones to passively detect, track, classify, and localize vocalizing mammals. Wavelet and conventional spectral analysis methods will be coupled to species-specific tracking algorithms. Behavioral clues from the acoustic data will be used to further reduce false alarm ...

Existing multistatic airborne ASW systems require high power sources and are unable to exploit the significant forward scattering strength of a submarine target due to the blinding presence of the direct blast. Time reversal (TR) is a recent method for focusing acoustic energy at a point using pairs of source and receive arrays. The TR focus provides a measure of propagation channel stability, al ...

The overall intent of this project is to develop a series of vector sensors for thin-line submarine towed array applications and down-select one for full evaluation via a comprehensive test campaign. Once the sensor is perfected, a production run of eight sensors will be performed so that a thin-line towed array section can be fabricated and tested. Each vector sensor under consideration will co ...

The overall intent of this project is to develop a triaxial pressure-acceleration vector sensor that is suitable for reliable acoustic path sensing. The sensor is intended to have a nominal size that is commensurate with an AN/SSQ-53 DIFAR sonobuoy wet-end transducer, have a 6 km submergence depth rating, and exhibit a noise floor of nominally 40 dB re 1 micro-pascals-squared per hertz. This is ...

The results of the Phase I effort demonstrated the feasibility of constructing a realistic, high fidelity active sonar clutter model that is not computationally intensive. Our first objective is to create a library of clutter objects based on statistical descriptors extracted from existing sonar databases. Our second objective is to create several surrogate acoustic environments using range depend ...

Applied Physical Sciences Corp. working with L-3 Communications Maripro will develop a trawl-resistant, Robust Deployable Acoustic Node (RDAN). The RDAN technology will enable the U.S. Navy to install and operate acoustic underwater training ranges in shallow water environment to enhance fleet readiness. The acoustic sensor on the node will be specially designed to provide excellent acoustic fid ...