Abstract
Target Strength(TS) is an important factor for the detection of the target in an active sonar system: thus the numerical model for the prediction of TS is widely being developed. For the frequency range of several kHz, the most important scattering mechanism is known to be specular reflection, which is largely affected by the geometrical shape of the target. In this paper, a numerical algorithm to predict TS is developed based on the Kirchhoff approximation which is computationally efficient. The developed algorithm is applied to the canonical targets of simple shapes, for which the analytical solutions exist. The numerical results show good agreement with the analytical solutions. Also, the algorithm is applied to more complex scatterers, and is compared with the experimental data obtained in the water tank experiment for the purpose of verifying the developed numerical model. Discussions on the effect of spatial sampling and other aspects of numerical m odeling are presented.
