UK company SEA (Systems Engineering & Assessment) has unveiled its new and improved thin line KraitArray towed Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) sonar at this year’s DSEI exhibition in London.
Compared to the current 50m, the KraitArray now extends up to 150m in length, offering operators greater detection and bearing ranges.
It is enabled by connectors between modules and offers up to ten times the current performance, according to the company. The latest version of KraitArray is expected to be ready for sea trials early in 2018.
As explained by SEA, the longer 16mm diameter KraitArray allows for at least 128 acoustic channels and features up to 32 non-acoustic sensors for monitoring array shape and orientation.
Improved hydrophones reduce the noise floor and improve low frequency performance. They can also be turned on and off to enable lower power consumption and greater redundancy.
The acoustic and non-acoustic channels are continuously and simultaneously sampled at high frequency. Acoustic signal digitisation and multiplexing occurs within the connectors, which have a plug and play Ethernet interface.
“Improved hydrophone performance, along with the longer length and higher channel count, will allow for increased detection ranges and greater target bearing resolution,” KraitArray Product Manager Alex Key said.
KraitArray has already been part of ASW trials carried out from unmanned vessels both in the UK during Unmanned Warrior16 and in various US trials.
“Our research and development goal is to progress KraitArray so that it delivers the same performance as an existing towed array,” Key added. “There are two strong markets in particular – the first is for fitting our Krait Defence System to small ships such as patrol craft and OPVs, while we see the thin line towed array as an ideal ASW solution for unmanned vessels.”