Allied Corporation

The Bendix Corporation

Alliedsignal Inc.

L-3 Communications Corporation

Merrill E Fife

Charles R Judy

David K Dahlstrom

Albert S Menin

Robert T Winnicki

Ernest Theodore Bick

Elmore Kittower

Scott A Hudson

James W Pell, Jr

A compact, modular sonar assembly for use on the bow of a ship having separate transmitting and receive arrays confined within a single acoustic housing. The narrow and compact design fits much better into the hydrodynamically desirable bulbous bow deign than the typical bow dome sonar design and achieves good performance at a low cost with reduced size and weight.

Bow dome sonar

A sonar system using closely spaced or interleaved projector and receiving transducer elements with a power inductor connected in series with the projector array transmits three separate frequencies and utilizes a resonant circuit connected across the projector array, and a switch alternately connecting the array to the transmitter or the resonant circuit. The resonant circuit has two parallel branches with an inductor in one branch and an inductor, a capacitor and a resistor in the parallel branch. An alternate embodiment includes a variable capacitor in series with the parallel circuit to simplify the tuning for individual installations. Values of the components were chosen to provide impedances looking into the resonant circuit which tend to maximize the 'stiffness' of the projector elements for all the received frequencies, thus inhibiting the tendency of the projector elements to receive and reradiate echo signals during the receiving cycle of the sonar system.

Tuned circuit for sonar beam pattern optimization

An underwater sonar transducer includes a centrally located beam with a plurality of stacks of piezoelectric transducer elements extending from each side, with a rigid end beam at the opposite end of each stack. A plurality of bolts extending from one end beam to the other on opposite sides of the stacks are tightened to apply a desired amount of prestress on the ceramic stacks. Arcuate radiating elements are welded to opposite sides of each end beam, end cap members are fastened to the centrally located beam at each end of the transducer and a jacket of elastomeric material is bonded to the edges of the end cap members to prevent ingress of fluid into the piezoelectric elements. Energizing of the piezoelectric elements causes expansion and contraction of the stacks, pushing the end beams in and out and causing bowing of the radiating elements to project sonar energy.

Underwater transducer

A flexural disk transducer includes two thickness poled piezoelectric disks each of which is bonded on one side to a metal backing plate of substantial thickness and on the other side to a thin metal 'skin' or plate. The metal backing plates are, in turn, bonded to a ring-shaped metal spacer member having a rectangular 'C' shaped cross section with the axially extending web made sufficiently thin and the radially extending flanges grooved such that the spacer member is sufficiently compliant that it has minimal effect on the resonant frequency of the disks. The disks are coated on each side with a thin layer of conducting material such as silver or copper and have radially extending wires serving as connections to such layers. The entire assembly is contained within a handling ring with the wire connections and the space between the assembly and the handling ring filled with electrical potting material. A thin layer of neoprene rubber covers the exposed faces of the disks for waterproofing.

Flexural disk transducer

A system for counting fish in a body of water uses one or more acoustic focusing liquid lens transducers each of which includes a large number of individual piezoelectric elements arranged in an arc to create a fan-shaped pattern of adjacent beams, each of which has a narrow beam width. An electrical counting circuit includes a clock producing a series of timing pulses supplied to a plurality of binary coded decimal (BCD) actuated switch circuits, one of which initiates sequential operation of transmit pulses from individual transducer elements. Timing of receiver operation is also controlled by said timing pulses after a delay to minimize 'ringing' of the transducer elements from the transmit pulses. Received echo signals are amplified, threshold detected and converted to uniform pulses. A second BCD actuated switch circuit cooperates with a series of range gates also connected to receive said timing pulses to control the distribution of the uniform echo pulses to one of a series of counters each of which receives and counts pulses from a single transducer element. Display means connected to the counters make it possible to read out counts on individual sectors individually or collectively or to print out counts from the counters at specified time intervals. Where a plurality of liquid lens transducers are used, they are connected to the same clock pulses such that they operate in synchronism.

Fish counter with scanning transducer

A hydrophone configuration provides compensation for longitudinal accelerations by placing two essentially identical solid ceramic piezoelectric elements back-to-back against a centrally located bulkhead in a strong cylindrical metal housing. The opposite ends of the elements are bonded to end caps which are mechanically sealed to the inside walls of the housing. The inside walls are spaced from the elements to allow any radial expansion or contraction of the elements to take place into an air chamber which is effectively isolated from the input to the hydrophone which is axial against the outside surfaces of the end caps. In a second embodiment two pairs of parallel-connected piezoelectric elements are included for a higher capacitance.

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Canyon Country, CA, United States of America

Merrill E Fife