ECE 110/120 Honors Lab Section : Hydrophone Array Signal Processing

Statement of Purpose

For our project, we want to learn how to construct a hydrophone and process signals from it in order to determine the direction of a sound from an acoustic pinger. While we don’t have experience with analog signal processing, we hope that through this project we can learn about this topic with the help of the CA’s. Ideally, we plan to have a simple hydrophone array set up on a 2D plane so we only worry about X and Y axes. We want to detect a ping in the 20-40kHz range.

Background Research

For this project we started out by hopping on Youtube and taking a look at homemade hydrophone projects. While we were watching the videos we took note on what supplies and materials we wish to use for our project. We also have looked at professional / commercial use hydrophones to see what kinds of technology has been developed for hydrophones. 

Please provide details on the background research your group has done for your project. Explain what drives you to work on this project and/or why this project is important. Also include discussions on any similar projects your group have looked at in coming up with your project. How is your proposed project different or similar to those your group have looked at. 

Block Diagram / Flow Chart

System Overview

We plan on having a hydrophone array of 8 different hydrophones arranged in a hexagonal pattern. Each of the hydrophones will be connected to a separate board with an amplifier, bandpass filter, and analog to digital converter. We will then use a digital signal processor which will take in these new digital signals and run an algorithm to determine the angle of which the ping came from. 

Parts

Provide a list of parts that you may need for your project. You should include details such as the quantity, model number, purpose, vendor, and price (excluding taxes and shipping) for each part. This list may change as you work on your project. 

Possible Challenges

• Building the hydrophone

• Finding a pizza element that will work sufficiently 

• Finding a shell for 8 individual hydrophones that will then be combined into an an array

• Creating the array

• Figuring out the design of how the array will utilize all 8 hydrophones 

• Processing Hydrophone signal 

• Potentially using an arduino uno to figure out how to convert the hydrophone signals into digital signals that we can utilize for sensing objects underwater 

References

List all references you used in your proposal. This is important, you do not want to be blamed for plagiarism. IEEE citation format is highly recommended. You can use citethisforme.com's IEEE citation generator to painlessly generate your references in this style.

https://duke-robotics.com/robosub-2021/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3Sm4YkPF9w 

https://felixblume.com/hydrophone/ 

https://saralana.xyz/hydrophone 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp6VoL89rhU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw77CYUT74c