Echo sounding

Echo sounding or depth sounding is the use of sonar for ranging, normally to determine the depth of water (bathymetry). It involves transmitting acoustic waves into water and recording the time interval between emission and return of a pulse; the resulting time of flight, along with knowledge of the speed of sound in water, allows determining the distance between sonar and target. This information is then typically used for navigation purposes or in order to obtain depths for charting purposes. Echo sounding can also be used for ranging to other targets, such as fish schools. Hydroacoustic assessments have traditionally employed mobile surveys from boats to evaluate fish biomass and spatial distributions. Conversely, fixed-location techniques use stationary transducers to monitor passing fish. The word sounding is used for all types of depth measurements, including those that don't use sound, and is unrelated in origin to the word sound in the sense of noise or tones. Echo sounding is a more rapid method of measuring depth than the previous technique of lowering a sounding line until it touched bottom. German inventor Alexander Behm was granted German patent No. 282009 for the invention of echo sounding (device for measuring depths of the sea and distances and headings of ships or obstacles by means of reflected sound waves) on 22 July 1913. One of the first commercial echo sounding units was the Fessenden Fathometer, which used the Fessenden oscillator to generate sound waves. This was first installed by the Submarine Signal Company in 1924 on the M&M liner S.S. Berkshire. Distance is measured by multiplying half the time from the signal's outgoing pulse to its return by the speed of sound in the water, which is approximately 1.5 kilometres per second [T÷2×(4700 feet per second or 1.5 km per second )] For precise applications of echosounding, such as hydrography, the speed of sound must also be measured typically by deploying a sound velocity probe into the water. Echo sounding is effectively a special purpose application of sonar used to locate the bottom.

Bed Topography Inference from Velocity Field Using Deep Learning.

Christophe Ancey, Mehrdad Kiani Oshtorjani

Measuring bathymetry has always been a major scientific and technological challenge. In this work, we used a deep learning technique for inferring bathymetry from the depth-averaged velocity field. The training of the neural network is based on 5742 labora ...

2023

Combining active and passive acoustic methods to image hydraulic fracture growth in laboratory experiments

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Seyyedmaalek Momeni, Dong Liu

We combine active and passive acoustic measurements to improve the spatio- temporal imaging of hydraulic fracture growth performed under true triaxial confinement in the laboratory. 64 active piezo-electric transducers (54 P waves, 10 S waves) work in sour ...

IOP2021

Inverse Problems in Pulse-Echo Ultrasound: Exploiting Coherence for Image Enhancement and Quantitative Imaging

Bed Topography Inference from Velocity Field Using Deep Learning.

Combining active and passive acoustic methods to image hydraulic fracture growth in laboratory experiments

Combining active and passive acoustic methods to image hydraulic fracture growth in laboratory experiments

Bed Topography Inference from Velocity Field Using Deep Learning.

Inverse Problems in Pulse-Echo Ultrasound: Exploiting Coherence for Image Enhancement and Quantitative Imaging