Feasibility of MEMS vector hydrophone application in submerged buoy system

In this paper, MEMS vector hydrophone is proposed to apply in submerged buoy system, and a large number of experiments are done to verify its feasibility. The MEMS vector hydrophone, a kind of underwater acoustic sensor, has lots of advantages, such as small size, low cost, better consistency and high sensitivity. When applied in submerged buoy system, it can sharply reduce the array aperture and can effectively detect the vector information of the marine sound field. Mainly, it can obtain good spatial gain and solve the problem of bulky volume of sonar equipment when applied in the field of low and very low frequency. The prototype of the submerged buoy system has undergone a number of indoor debugging and outdoor tests. After the preliminary treatment of the trial data, the results show that this system can effectively detect the acoustic field vector signal in range of 20-1000 kHz under ocean. The MEMS vector hydrophone sensitivity can reach －176 dB and has a good 8 shaped directivity pattern.