Quantifying mutual interactions between transducers within active sonar arrays

Predicting the performance of high power acoustic sources deployed in arrays is of vital importance to sonar designers. Great success has been achieved in applying methods based on combining finite element and boundary element techniques. These offer efficient and cost-effective predictive design tools that are accurate with the flexibility to address a wide variety of conceptual designs. An important consideration for arrays are the mutual interaction effects between transducers. These can be quantified directly for each individual transducer using mechanical and acoustic field quantities only. They may also be determined independently by implicit consideration of the detailed electrical behaviour from the piezoelectric drives. This allows for comprehensive examination of the predicted response of each individual transducer. We illustrate this paper with an example of a line array of free flooding ring (FFR) projectors. Results are presented for various relative spacings between neighbouring FFRs