SiPLABoratory

As an enginnering based laboratory, SiPLAB develops unique equipment for underwater acoustic exploration since 2000. Specific pieces of equipment include marine electronics, cables, acoustic and non-acoustic sensors, data acquisition and communications. Sea going apparatus require also the management of flotation technology, mechanical robustness, fail proof remote systems and deployment and recover capabilities. Major pieces of equipment are listed below and described in detail in the links provided.

Transmit Receive Array (TRA)

A 10 transducer vertical array is under development as a consequence of project Underwater Acoustic Barriers (UAB). More importantly the TRA system will allow for not only harbor protection but also for acoustic communication focusing (active time reversal) and MIMO communications. End of development phase is foreseen during the summer of 2010 and first tests at sea to take place during fall.

Subsurface Telemetry Unit (STU)

The involvement of SiPLAB in project UAN has lead to the development of a bottom mounted receiving array for gateway communication between the underwater network and the WAN. The telemetry unit is part of the base station to which it is connected by a fiber optic power cable. The STU will be tested at sea during the Eng.Test 2010 scheduled for the end of March of 2010 in the vicinity of Vilamoura (Portugal) with the participation of various SiPLAB members and also from other UAN project partners.

Acoustic Oceanographic Buoy - version 2 (AOB2)

The involvement of SiPLAB in project RADAR has lead to the development of a second version of the AOB with improved characteristics: compact hardware based on the PC104 standard, data acquisitions upto 32 channels at sampling of 50 kHz/channel, small size and lighter, same autonomy and on board DSP based processing for data reduction, band shift and underwater communications channel equalization. The AOB2 was tested during the MakaiEx sea trial in October 2005 and later on used in the RADAR'06 and BP'07 sea trials.

Acoustic Oceanographic Buoy - version 1 (AOB1)

Under project LOCAPASS SiPLAB has developed a prototype of a light sonobuoy for source localization, acoustic tomography and underwater communications. The AO-Buoy is part of a new concept of network tomography, where a number of free-drifting buoys are simultaneously deployed either from ship or aircraft to collect acoustic and oceanographic data at GPS known locations. The data is transmitted to a base station via a wireless lan network for massive processing and inversion/localization / communications. The AO-Buoy autonomy is set to 10 hours. When they are recovered, data transfer and battery recharge takes a few hours and the AO-Buoy network is ready for redeployment. The AO-Buoy prototype has been fully developed at SiPLAB and tested at sea for shallow water acoustic tomography during the MREA'03 sea trial, from June 18 - 26, 2003 in the area north of Elba Island (Italy) and during the MREA'04 sea trial, from 2 - 10 April, 2004 off the west coast of Portugal.

Broadband Lubell acoustic source

This is model 1424HP sound source made by Lubell. It is a piezoelectric transducer delivering 197 dB/uPA/1 m @ 600 Hz (80 V rms). Its main advantage is its size and weigth for a usefull band of 400 Hz - 8 kHz. Its main disadvantage is the limited depth rating of 12 m without pressure compensation. Purchased under projects NUACE and UAB.

Low frequency acoustic source

This sound source has been built by Eramer, France, and delivered to CINTAL, for SiPLAB use under project ATOMS. This is a Janus-Helmolthz transducer with a source level of 210 dB and a bandwidth 350-900 Hz mounted on a tow fish. It also features a junction box with a monitor hydrohone and a pressure gauge.

ULVA - Ultra Light Vertical Array

The ULVA system was originaly developed by COLMAR Srl. (Italy) in 1998 for the purpose of project INTIMATE(1998-2001). This system is composed of a surface buoy and two vertical arrays: one low frequency 16 hydrophone-4m spacing array and a high frequency 4 hydrophone array. The LF array has a max bandwidth of 2.2 kHz while the HF array has a bandwidth of 8 kHz centered in 50, 60 or 75 kHz. Each array has a dedicated deep water telemetry unit that can be simultaneously connected to the surface buoy. The surface buoy has got two remote connection fittings: the original system that transmits all data on real time to the remote station via a dedicated 1.2 GHz data link and a SiPLAB developed self registering data with a wireless lan data link for data and buoy status monitoring. This last system was developed under project ATOMS(2000-2004).