The Journal of the Acoustical Society of KoreaISSN:1225-4428(Print) 2287-3775(Online)한국음향학회

The Line array sonar consisting of several hydrophones increases array gain and improves the performance for detecting the direction of the target compared to single hydrophone. However, line array sonar produces the bearing error that makes it difficult to determine the bearing of incoming source signal due to the relation between bearing angle of target and vertical angle of multipath signals. Vertical angles of multipath are varied with the geometry of receiver and target and various underwater environments, therefore it is necessary to consider the bearing error to estimate accurately the bearing of the target. In this study, acoustic modelling was performed to understand the effect of multipath signals on the target signal. The errors of bearing angle estimated from the bottom bounced signals are calculated with several environment. In addition, the expected bearing line, as a function of source-receiver range, compensated for the bearing error is predicted from the estimated bearing angle.