Effects of Acoustic Multipath Interactions on Source Range and Bearing Estimation for a Focused Line Array

摘要

A computer simulation technique was developed to investigate the effects of acoustic multipath interactions on source range and bearing estimation for a focused line array. To simulate the multipath environment, the Generic Sonar Model (Weinberg, NUSC TD 5971, 19 December 1981) was used to modify source signals and emulate oceanic transmissions to individual sensors. Characteristics of a narrowhead freaquency domain focuses bearformer were implemented incorporatilng wavefront curvature techniques and a maximum-likelihood estomator. Simulations for sparsely populated colinear arrays were conducted at several frequencies for differing sound speed profiles, bottom loss conditions, and source/receiver configurations. The beamformer output was used to obtain relative array pressure ressponse and analyzed to obtain sosurce range and bearing estimation errors. For a given envirnmental case the results indicate no bearing and relatively small range errors for a source located at broadside for the simulated range and frequency parameters.