Fundamentals of Sonar

Course details This three day sonar training course is intended as a follow on to the Introduction to Sonar course, enabling you to progress from an introductory level through to advanced topics within one week. This course will include the following topics: Acoustic wave theory Complex representation of fields Vibration and acoustics Characteristic lengthy scales Wave number representation Interaction of sound with structures. Transducer technology / array performance Transducer materials Sonar transducer construction and physical analysis Transducer equivalent circuits and array performance analysis. Signal processing and displays Digital signal processing Time series and frequency spectra Detection theory Pulse design Dynamic range and normalisation. Target echo strength Derivation of TES for a simple sphere Experimental measurement of TES TES experiments Target Scattering Physics. Acoustic beams and beamforming Array directivity theory and approximations Computational requirements for beamforming Shading and adaptive beamforming Beam coverage and bearing accuracy. Sidescan and autonomous underwater vehicle sonars Sidescan sonar characteristics and geometry Synthetic aperture sonar Bathymetric sonars AUVs and their sonars. Fundamentals of towed arrays Array construction and performance Left/right ambiguity Beam shading, shape correction and range focusing. Sonar target recognition Acoustic and motion classification clues Manual and automatic classification techniques Passive, active and intercept sonar recognition. The sonar equation Pitfalls in the use of the sonar equation Theory and practice of sonar detection Variability and degradation Synthetic acoustic environments. Future trends in sonar The future challenge Network centric philosophy Sonar hardware and processing developments Environmental issues.