Sub-critical insonification of buried elastic shells

Abstract

In a shallow water environment a high frequency high grazing angle mine-hunting sonar approach is vastly limited by the coverage rate, making the detection and classification of buried objects using subcritical grazing incidence an attractive alternative. One of the central issues in mine countermeasurements regarding the physics of scattering from spherical shells is the isolation and the analysis of the resonant excitations of the system distinguishing the manmade elastic targets from rocks or other clutter. Burial of an elastic target in the seabed results in a variety of modifications to the scattered response caused by different physical mechanisms, geometric constrains, and intrinsic sediment properties. The aim of this research is to identify, analyze, and explain the fundamental effects of the sediment and the proximity of the seabed interface on the scattering of sound from elastic spherical shells insonified using low frequencies at subcritical incident angles. A new, comprehensive understanding of the goats98 experimental data was obtained distinguishing the effects of the acoustics environment from the resonant signature of a buried elastic target. To achieve this and to further investigate the more intricate details of the scattering process, a numerically improved, OASES-3D modeling framework was used. [Work supported by ONR.]