Objective

Many active and former military installations have ordnance ranges and training areas with adjacent water environments in which unexploded ordnance (UXO) now exist due to wartime activities, dumping, and accidents. Innovative technologies are needed to characterize and separate UXO from false targets and to discriminate among individual UXO targets themselves. In SERDP project MR-1513, researchers successfully demonstrated that typical underwater UXO scatter appreciable levels of sound over what is called the structural acoustics (SA) domain; that these signals would be detectable at modest ranges in most environments of interest; and that, in the free-field case, SA features can be used to separate UXO from other targets.

The objective of this project is to address the scientific and technical issues whose resolution would permit the realization of an efficient, high-performance structural acoustic, feature-based underwater sonar technology that can detect and localize proud or buried targets and separate the detections into UXO versus non-UXO without the need for high-resolution imaging. This will be realized by employing a marine-based measurement sonar--one that can look both downward and horizontally, conducting a series of measurement exercises in suitable marine environments, combining these databases with numerical models to develop a physics-based understanding of the structural acoustics, developing robust identification algorithms based on the SA features, and demonstrating the ability of the SA technique to detect and classify proud and buried UXO in the presence of natural and man-made clutter.