Experimental study of bubble sources localization in a water tank for oil spill detection

Abstract

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, there have been increasing demand for a real-time monitoring system that can detect, locate, and assess oil leakages. To this goal, we launched a three-year research project to develop a passive acoustic technique in 2017. The leaked crude oil creates underwater sound through bubble oscillations in an oil spill event. This paper focuses on studying the localization of the source of bubble-induced sounds in an experimental environment. Hydrophone arrays were deployed randomly and used to receive the acoustic signals in a 2 m × 2 m × 2 m water tank. We used spatial spectrum analysis algorithms such as Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) and Estimation of Signal Parameters by Rotational Invariance Techniques (ESPRIT) to determine the direction of arrival (DOA) by a hydrophone Uniform Linear Array (ULA), and utilized the multiple 2-D angles to localize the bubbles in 3-D space. We will also investigate the sensitivity of the localization algorithm with respect to the variations of physical features such as the cluster of frequency components and noise level. Experiment results will be presented and discussed.Since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, there have been increasing demand for a real-time monitoring system that can detect, locate, and assess oil leakages. To this goal, we launched a three-year research project to develop a passive acoustic technique in 2017. The leaked crude oil creates underwater sound through bubble oscillations in an oil spill event. This paper focuses on studying the localization of the source of bubble-induced sounds in an experimental environment. Hydrophone arrays were deployed randomly and used to receive the acoustic signals in a 2 m × 2 m × 2 m water tank. We used spatial spectrum analysis algorithms such as Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) and Estimation of Signal Parameters by Rotational Invariance Techniques (ESPRIT) to determine the direction of arrival (DOA) by a hydrophone Uniform Linear Array (ULA), and utilized the multiple 2-D angles to localize the bubbles in 3-D space. We will also investigate the sensitivity of the localization algorithm with respect...