Design, development and construction of fibre-optic bottom mounted array

We report the development of a novel seabed hydrophone array, the Fibre Optic Bottom Mounted Array (FOBMA) which uses a combination of time and dense wavelength division multiplexing (TDM/DWDM) to achieve 96 hydrophone channels, in an architecture which can readily be expanded to much higher channel counts. The array also makes use of remotely pumped optical amplification techniques to increase the standoff between the array and interrogation system. The FOBMA system has been developed as a collaboration between the Naval Research Laboratory and QinetiQ (formally DERA), and has tackled all aspects of the system development, from system architecture studies through electronic system design, sensor design, array mechanical design, array construction and array acoustic testing.