What is it about?
Using fibre optic cables to listen to sound in the environment is becoming very widely used, especially underwater, where telecommunications cables can be repurposed to detect and track ships, trawls, anchor dragging, whales, earthquakes, meteors and much more. But we do not yet properly understand how the acoustic pressure field associated with sound deforms the cable to produce the detection. It certainly depends on the frequency and angle of the sound field. This work explores these questions and gives the first crude estimates of sensitivity as a function of acoustic frequency and source angle.
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Why is it important?
Using fibre optic cables as acoustic sensors is revolutionising the way we sense the environment, especially underwater, as it is much cheaper than traditional methods and gives much better coverage and resolution. But to properly understand what we are hearing, we need to be able to calibrate the fibre response to sound. This work supports the massive growth in applications of this technique, including for undersea acoustic communications.
Perspectives
I think that there is great potential for marine robotics systems to use this technique to immediately communicate short messages about their findings to shore. This will have a huge impact on how teams of marine robots cooperate and are used to monitor and patrol critical undersea infrastructures, for example.
Prof. John POTTER
NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Distributed Acoustic Sensing of Underwater Acoustic Communication Packets: Effects of Frequency and Incidence Angle, October 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3699432.3699494.
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