Geoacoustic inversion using very-low-frequency modal interference characteristics.

This paper presents a modal-based geoacoustic inversion method adapted for a very-low-frequency leaky waveguide. It is applied to air gun data collected by a seismic streamer during the multi-channel seismic exploration experiment in the South Yellow Sea. The inversion is carried out by filtering the waterborne and bottom-trapped mode pairs from the received signal and comparing the modal interference features (waveguide invariant) to replica fields. The effective seabed models are inferred at two positions, and the two-way-travel time of basement interface reflected waves calculated using these models exhibit good agreement with geological exploration results.

Very low frequency three-dimensional beamforming for a miniaturized aperture acoustic vector sensor array.

In this Letter, a three-dimensional beamforming method is proposed for a miniaturized aperture acoustic vector sensor (AVS) array. This method extracts the multipole modes using the AVS array, and then synthesizes the desired beam pattern according to the relation between multipole modes and spherical harmonics. Compared to the spherical harmonics decomposition of the sound field method, the proposed method achieves comparable array gain with higher white noise gain when the distance of adjacent elements d and the wavelength λ satisfy 0.01≤d/λ≤0.2. Experimental results also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed three-dimensional beamforming method at very low frequency.

A Linear Piezoelectric Actuator Using "A-Shaped" Structure.

A new design of linear piezoelectric actuator using "A-shaped" structure was proposed, designed, fabricated, and tested. By fusion design of the piezoelectric transducer and the mechanical structure, the proposed actuator only uses the first bending vibration of the center piezoelectric transducer to work. Frequency degeneration is no longer needed, which enables the actuator to adjust its structural parameters according to the application conditions. When applying an alternating voltage at resonance frequency, the center piezoelectric transducer will be stimulated in the first bending vibration. The vibration energy transmitted to the two driving arms generates alternating tilting movements with a phase difference of 180° between the two driving feet, which enables the actuator to push the linear guide when a vertical preload is applied. Under the preload of 120 N, the actuator gained a maximum thrust force of 9.8 N and a maximum output power of 0.62 W with a self-weight of 0.061 kg. The maximum output thrust density and the maximum output power density were 160.6 N/kg and 10.2 W/kg, respectively.

A theoretical model of the intermittent contact of piezoelectric actuator based on Greenwood-Williamson theory.

A theoretical model of the intermittent contact mechanism of linear piezoelectric actuator was proposed, in which the microscopic characteristics of the contact surfaces were taken into account. Greenwood-Williamson (GM) theory was involved for the first time to describe the microscopic characteristics of the contact surfaces in which the contact surfaces were considered as random rough surfaces that were composed of large amounts of asperities and the heights of the asperities conformed to a Gauss distribution. The developed theoretical model gives an insight into the influence of the microscopic properties, as well as the macroscopic and material properties on the output performance of the actuator, which may provide guidance for the design of such type of piezoelectric actuator. During the modeling, normal kinetic contact force, kinetic friction coefficient, friction force and steady-state output force of were obtained in sequence. And some simulations were carried out to analyze how factors such as the type of material, the roughness of the contact surface, the initial distance between the stator and the rotor, and the preload, et.al, affect the contact performance. A set of experiments were carried out to reveal the influence of surface roughness, material type and preload on the steady-state output thrust. The simulated results were found in good agreement with the experiment ones at most of the tested points. Finally, surface roughness of the stator and rotor were tested before and after the operation, which indicated that the rotor and stator had similar roughness after operation.

Passive Detection of Ship-Radiated Acoustic Signal Using Coherent Integration of Cross-Power Spectrum with Doppler and Time Delay Compensations.

Passive sonar is widely used for target detection, identification and classification based on the target radiated acoustic signal. Under the influence of Doppler, generated by relative motion between the moving target and the sonar array, the received ship-radiated acoustic signals are non-stationary and time-varying, which has a negative effect on target detection and other fields. In order to reduce the influence of Doppler and improve the performance of target detection, a coherent integration method based on cross-power spectrum is proposed in this paper. It can be concluded that the frequency shift and phase change in the cross-power spectrum obtained by each pair of data segments can be corrected with the compensations of time scale (Doppler) factor and time delay. Moreover, the time scale factor and time delay can be estimated from the amplitude and phase of the original cross-power spectrum, respectively. Therefore, coherent integration can be implemented with the compensated cross-power spectra. Simulation and experimental data processing results show that the proposed method can provide sufficient processing gains and effectively extract the discrete spectra for the detection of moving targets.

A Passive Source Location Method in a Shallow Water Waveguide with a Single Sensor Based on Bayesian Theory.

Bayesian methodology is a good way to infer unknown parameters in a marine environment. A passive source location method in a shallow water waveguide with a single sensor based on Bayesian theory is presented in this paper. The input of a Bayesian inversion algorithm is received different normal mode impulse signals, which are separated and extracted with a warping transformation from received broadband impulse signals. The source range, depth, and other seabed parameters were estimated without prior knowledge of the seabed information. Different normal mode impulse acoustic signals travelling at different group speeds arrived at the sensor at different times because of the dispersion characteristics of the shallow water waveguide. The time delay of different modes can be used for the passive source location. However, normal mode group speeds are greatly affected by the environmental parameters. The performance of the passive location becomes negative when parameters mismatch. In this paper, the source location was transformed to the inversion of the source location and environmental parameters, which can be estimated accurately based on the multi-dimensional posterior probability density (PPD). This method is less limited by environmental factors, and the accuracy of inversion results can be analyzed according to the PPD of inversion parameters, which has higher reliability and a wider application scope. The effectiveness and robustness of the algorithm were quantified in terms of the root mean squared error (RMSE) at a variety of signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in 50 simulation sets. The RMSE values decreased with the SNR. The validity and accuracy of the method were proved by the results of simulation and experiment data.

Extracting the time domain Green's function from ocean ambient noise using acoustic vector sensors.

A function that closely resembles the two-point time-domain Green's function (TDGF) representing the time delays associated with multipath between the two sensors can be recovered by correlating the noise field measured by two sensors. Here, a technique for extracting the TDGF from ambient ocean noise using acoustic vector sensors is presented. Experimental results suggest that the averaging time to extract TDGF is greatly reduced if sound pressure sensors (hydrophones) are replaced by acoustic vector sensors. The direct arrival and bottom bounce arrival were extracted successfully with only 1 min of vertical velocity data, while the bottom bounce arrival was not extracted with even 10 min of sound pressure data.

Estimating the delay-Doppler of target echo in a high clutter underwater environment using wideband linear chirp signals: Evaluation of performance with experimental data.

A chirp signal is a signal with linearly varying instantaneous frequency over the signal bandwidth, also known as a linear frequency modulated (LFM) signal. It is widely used in communication, radar, active sonar, and other applications due to its Doppler tolerance property in signal detection using the matched filter (MF) processing. Modern sonar uses high-gain, wideband signals to improve the signal to reverberation ratio. High gain implies a high product of the signal bandwidth and duration. However, wideband and/or long duration LFM signals are no longer Doppler tolerant. The shortcoming of the standard MF processing is loss of performance, and bias in range estimation. This paper uses the wideband ambiguity function and the fractional Fourier transform method to estimate the target velocity and restore the performance. Target velocity or Doppler provides a clue for differentiating the target from the background reverberation and clutter. The methods are applied to simulated and experimental data.