Shallow Water High Resolution Multi-Beam Echo Sounder

This paper presents a Shallow water High Resolution Multi-Beam Echo Sounder (SHMBES), which will be used widely in modern ocean exploration and underwater engineering. It is highly synthesized and developed on the basis of many new techniques such as theories of underwater acoustic and modern signal processing, Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI), DSP array processing, etc. It is mainly composed of sonar deck unit (including multi-channels receiver and A/D conversion, real-time digital signal processing system, host computer and interface, etc.) and sonar watertight housing (including transducer, signal generation and control phased transmitter, etc.), as well as real-time and postprocessing software. Five parts are discussed in the paper: Section I is system structure and technical specification. Section II is the theory analysis of split sub-array phase detection and multiple sub- array detection methods. In this section the improved multiple sub- array detection method is presented. Section III is precision evaluation experiment. Three sub-array configurations are chose to process the experimental data obtained at sea based on theoretical analysis. It has shown that, with optimized parameters, the multiple sub-array detection method not only realizes the wide coverage, but also improves the detection performance. Section IV lists Songhua Lake and Mogan Lake measurement results of underwater terrain. The instrument validity of hardware and software is tested by these lake experiments. Section V are the conclusions of the paper.