No abstract

When evaluating the ship’s underwater electric field stealth, the underwater electric potential or the underwater electric field is often used, but it is easily affected by the environment conditions. As a result, the evaluating accuracy is not high. To solve this problem, the equivalent electric dipole moment is used as the evaluating factor in this paper. Firstly, the method of inverting the equivalent electric dipole moment in the frequency domain is proposed. However, the limited measuring range will also lead to some errors based on the proposed method. As a result, we improve the proposed method by applying an integral correction which uses a standard dipole source. To test the effectiveness of this method, a simulation experiment is carried out, and the results show that the method has high inversion accuracy even in a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environment. This method has provided a new technological approach for evaluating the ship’s corrosion-related static electric field.

No abstract

The natural electric field at the depth of 0 ∼ 1500 m in high seas of South China Sea is obtained by using a new type of measuring device. The electric field data in the 0.01 ∼ 0.5 Hz and 0.5 ∼ 30 Hz frequency range are analyzed respectively. The results show that the induced electric field generated by the surface wave (about 0.14 Hz in the experiment) is obvious at the depth of 50 m but can be ignored at the depth greater than 100 m. When the depth increases from 50 m to 1500 m, the peak-to-peak value of the natural electric field gradually decreases. At the depth of 1000 m, the peak-to-peak values are 0.04 ∼ 0.08 μV/m in the 0.01 ∼ 0.5 Hz range, and 0.07 ∼ 0.1 μV/m in the 0.5 ∼ 30 Hz range. At last, the natural electric field in coastal water near Sanya City, where the water depth is 15 m, is measured by means of a sinking device. The results show that the peak-to-peak values are about 2 ∼ 4 μV/m in the 0.01 ∼ 0.5 Hz range and 2 μV/m in the 0.5 ∼ 30 Hz range. By comparing the natural electric field in high seas with that of coastal water, we find the latter has a larger peak-to-peak value at nearly the same water depth. In addition, line spectrum noise often occurs in coastal water, while it is rarely observed in high seas when the water depth is more than 50 m.

In order to decrease the ship's static electric field as much as possible, the ship potential and static electric field are compared under different conditions, natural corrosion, sacrificial anodes protection, normal and advanced impressed-current cathodic protection and impressed-current compensation based on boundary element calculating software. Then a scaled ship model experiment was conducted for the validation of numerical results. The results show that the method based on impressed-current compensation can most effectively decrease the ship's static electric field compared with other methods, but the whole ship areas are not under cathodic protection.