• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.61 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2024

Underwater sound speed is an important analysis parameter on an estimation of the underwater radiated noise (URN) emitted from vessels. This paper aims to present an underwater sound speed measurement procedure using a cross-correlation of time-domain acoustic signals and validate the procedure through an experiment in a reverberant water tank. For the purpose, time-domain acoustic signals transmitted by a Gaussian pulse excitation from an acoustic projector have been measured at 20 hydrophone positions in the reverberant water tank. Then, the sound speed in water has been calculated by a linear regression using 190 cross-correlation cases of distances and time lags between the received signals and the result has been compared with those estimated by the existing empirical formulae. From the result, it is regarded that the presented experimental procedure to measure an underwater sound speed is reliably applicable if the time resolution is sufficiently high in the measurement.