Array gain for a cylindrical array with baffle scatter effects

Abstract

Cylindrical arrays used in sonar for passive underwater surveillance often have sensors surrounding a cylindrical metal baffle. In some operational sonars, the phones in each stave (i.e., each line of phones aligned with the cylinder axis) are hardwired together so that the array is equivalent to a baffled circular array of directional elements, where each element corresponds to a line array of omnidirectional phones steered to broadside. In this paper a model is introduced for computing the array gain of such an array at high frequencies, which incorporates baffle scatter using infinite, rigid cylinder scattering theory, and with ambient noise described by an angular spectral density function. In practice the phones are often offset from the baffle surface, and the acoustic field sampled by the staves is distorted at high frequencies due to interference between the incident and scattered fields. Examples are given to illustrate the resulting array gain degradation, using three noise distributions that are frequently used in sonar performance modeling: three-dimensional isotropic, two-dimensional isotropic, and surface dipole noise.