Design and Numerical Evaluation of Off-Axis Aplanatic Straubel Mirror for Underwater Acoustic Imaging

Abstract

An aplanatic Straubel mirror was designed for underwater acoustic imaging. However, there was a problem in that incident sound waves coming into the aplanatic Straubel mirror were interrupted by a receiver array placed in front of the mirror. An off-axis Straubel mirror is proposed to solve this problem. In this study, an off-axis aplanatic Straubel mirror is designed and evaluated using numerical calculation to verify the feasibility of the off-axis design. Upon comparison of the off-axis and ordinary aplanatic Straubel mirrors, the off-axis mirror shows almost the same convergence property as the ordinary one when a receiver array exists. The off-axis aplanatic Straubel mirror is compared with an aplanatic Fresnel lens because this lens is not affected by the receiver. The results show that the off-axis mirror showed a smaller aberration than the aplanatic Fresnel lens at a wider angle of view. #