Experimental Investigation of the Interference Structure in a Shallow-Water Vector Acoustic Field

The waveguide invariant concept describes the interference striations in the acoustic pressure spectrograms produced with an underwater broadband source. In this paper, the existence of interference structure in the vector acoustic field is examined using sea trial data, and the waveguide invariant is exploited to interpret fringes of the vector field. The experimental data, which recorded a merchant vessel passing on a straight path, were collected by a 2-dimensional vector sensor during an experiment in the South China Sea. The intensity and phase spectra of the energy flux density vector in the acoustic field radiated by the moving vessel are obtained from the magnitude and phase angle of the product of the pressure and the horizontal particle velocity's complex conjugate. Distinct interference patterns appear in the vector intensity and phase spectra. The characteristics of these have been analyzed by comparison with the scaled acoustic field. The equation describing the striations associated with the ship's trajectory is derived from waveguide invariant theory. The Hough transform method is used to extract the waveguide invariant from the data. To improve the quality of the patterns derived from the vector field, a better value of waveguide invariant can be estimated. Good agreement between reconstructed trajectories and real patterns suggests that it is feasible to use the interference structure in an acoustic vector field to determine the waveguide characteristics.