Research on ship wake acoustic imaging based on multi-beam sonar

Scale features and spatial distribution are important characteristics of ship wakes. As the generation mechanism and spatial distribution of ship wakes are very complex, the high precision ship wake acoustic feature detection has been a difficult problem and also a hot spot at home and abroad. The conventional ship wake detection method using single-beam echo sonar relies on single point and single frequency detection. The method has low efficiency and is not able to get fully acoustic scattering feature and spatial distribution scale features. In this paper, the portable multi-beam bathymetric sonar developed by Harbin Engineering University was used to measure the acoustic backscattering from ship wakes applying both upward-oriented mounting scheme and horizontal-oriented mounting scheme. The acoustic images of the ship wakes were obtained. Comparison was made between two schemes which shows that the horizontal-oriented mounting scheme was more convenient and can be avoid from the affection of specular scatter from the ocean surface.