sidescansonar-hydrakula.docVIP

Sidescan Sonar General information Sidescan sonars are primarily designed to provide “acoustic images” of the seafloor, with high resolution. In marine geoscience, they are therefore used to give a near-visual representation of the geological facies (Lurton, 2002). Additionally, sidescan sonars are useful tools for target detection, e.g. ship wrecks, pipelines and cables. A sidescan sonar system consists of a recording device, an underwater sensor (a towfish with a transducer on the port and starboard side, respectively), and a tow cable to connect the two. In basic operation, the recorder charges capacitors in the towfish trough the tow cable. On command from the recorder this stored power is dumped to the transducers, which emit an acoustic pulse that propagates through the water (Fish and Carr, 1990). The acoustic waves transmitted by the sonar interact with the seafloor and most of the energy is reflected specularly (figure 1). The distance travelled from the transducer to the target of the seafloor is called the slant-range. It is not to be confused with the horizontal distance between the sonar’s nadir and the target (ground-range). The total distance ensonified across-track is called the swath width, which is two times the selected range. The angle between the incoming wave and the seafloor is called the angle of incidence. The grazing angle is 90° minus the incidence angle, i.e. the angle between the incoming wave and the local normal to the seafloor (Blondel and Murton, 1997). Figure 1: Geometry of sidescan sonar and definitions of some basic parameters (Blondel and Murton, 1997). The returning echoes from the seafloor are received by the transducers over a very short period of time (in the range of milliseconds), amplified, and transmitted up the tow cable to the recorder. The recorder further processes these signals, digitizes them, calculates the proper position for them in the record, pixel by pixel, and then prints these echoes on thermal paper, one