Estimation of Angular Location and Directivity Compensation of Split-beam Acoustic Transducer for a 50 kHz Fish Sizing Echo Sounder

The most satisfactory split-beam transducer for fish sizing maintains a wide bearing angle region for correct fish tracking without interference from side lobes and lower sensitivity to fish echoes outside of the main lobe region to correctly measure the angular location of free-swimming fishes in the sound beam. To evaluate the performance of an experimentally developed 50 kHz split-beam transducer, the angular location of a target was derived from the electrical phase difference between the resultant signals for the pair of transducer quadrants in the horizontal and vertical planes consisting of 32 transducer elements. The electrical phase difference was calculated by cross-spectral density analysis for the signals from the pair of receiving transducer quadrants, and the directivity correction factor for a developed split-beam transducer was estimated as the fourth-order polynomial of the off-axis beam angle for the angular location of the target. The experimental results demonstrate that the distance between the acoustic centers for the pair of receiving transducer quadrants can be controlled to less than one wavelength by optimization with amplitude-weighting transformers, and a smaller center spacing provides a range of greater angular location for tracking of a fish target. In particular, a side lobe level of -25.2 dB and an intercenter spacing of $0.96\lambda$($\lambda$= wavelength) obtained in this study suggest that the angular location of fish targets distributing within a range of approximately ${\pm}28^{\circ}$ without interference from side lobes can be measured.

50 kHz 체장어군탐지기용 분할 빔 음향 변환기의 지향성 보정 및 위치각 추정