Hydrophones
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A suite of cutting-edge new sensors installed at the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s (AIMS) ReefWorks tropical marine technology test ranges are set to provide live information to future test range users about currents, turbidity, vessels, and marine mammals in the vicinity.
While satellite data provides a wealth of information about the world, it cannot effectively relay what is happening beneath the surface of the ocean in real time. This makes testing and operating uncrewed vessels, particularly autonomous underwater vessels (AUVs), challenging.
Acquired by AIMS with the support of the Queensland Government, the new sensors include a frame fitted with a hydrophone, a smart mooring that measures waves and currents and surface buoys that measure turbidity.
The smart mooring also includes an acoustic doppler velocimeter (ADV) that sits in the water column to measure currents.
ReefWorks Systems Engineer Vic Grosjean said the hydrophone could detect the different acoustic signatures of marine mammals, such as dugongs, dolphins, and whales, as well as identify different types of vessels and uncrewed platforms.
Mr Grosjean explained, “At this stage we still need to retrieve the mooring to download the data it collects but, in not-too-distant future, we expect it will be able to provide live passive acoustic monitoring of both our inshore test range and our Davies Reef. This live data will be an important environmental management feature and has some exciting potential applications.
“Typically, our current sensors sit on the ocean bed, but at our inshore test range it would get buried in sediment quite quickly. We will avoid this because the ADV is suspended in the water column in one of the deepest areas of our inshore test range. The data collected will help guide the construction of the new wharf to minimise sedimentation impacts.”
Understanding currents in real time is set to inform decisions about where and when to launch small underwater vehicles, and will help to quickly pinpoint and retrieve uncrewed systems that lose contact with operators before they start to drift. Mr Grosjean stated that the smart mooring also measured wave activity on the range.
During the deployment of the hydrophone and ADV, two buoys with turbidity sensors that had been deployed a few months previously were retrieved to measure the amount of sedimentation on the ReefWorks inshore test range.
