Self-monitoring sonar transducer array with the internal accelerometers

To achieve the maximum detection range for active sonar systems, it is desirable to maximize their acoustic power. To do so, there are two limitations which are caused by cavitation on the face of the transducer and interaction effect between transducer elements of the array. To avoid these limitations, a method to drive each array element to yield the desired radiation uniform in-phase velocity of motion is proposed. For this purpose, the sonar transducer array which has internal accelerometers for monitoring the motion of the transducer element was developed. This paper presents an outline of this sonar array and a high speed numerical calculation method for the prediction of the radiation characteristics of the array using DFT algorithm.