Development of Automated Measurement Setup for Characterizing Underwater Acoustic Transducers

Abstract

Accurate determination of sensitivity and directivity is important for any underwater acoustic transducer. In this work, an automatic measuring platform was designed and implemented for characterizing underwater acoustic transducers. The overall hardware setup includes a PXI (PCI Extensions for Instrumentation)-based data acquisition system, computer-based controller module, motion controller module, and LabVIEW-based automatic calibration program. The system performs a sequence of operations automatically and achieves synchronous control of transmission and acquisition of real-time acoustic signals as well as processing, recording, and report generation. This measurement platform can be utilized for characterizing any type of acoustic transducer for its receiving sensitivity, transmitting response, and directivity measurement as per IEC60565 standard. The measurement results for RESON TC4034 and RESON TC 2080 transducers are presented and the results show that the system is able to carry out accurate calibration and characterization of any underwater acoustic transducer. Sources of uncertainty for calibration are also presented with the confidence level of approximately 95%.