DEWARS: Deep Water Acoustic Range System

The deep water acoustic range system (DEWARS) provides noise levels and spectrum levels measures in a real and controlled scenario of surface vessels and submarines (including periscope, snorkeling and immersion depth).

These measures allow:

• Establishing noise levels of the ship in different operational conditions, such as patrol speed, ultra quite speed, and inception speed. In the case of submarines with different machinery speeds and depths
• Establishing the status of the vessel within its class
• Developing and validating studies for signature reduction and mathematical influence propagation models
• Provide a signature database to record and retrieve recorded information of a ship, such as ship characteristics, broadband noise analysis, and narrowband noise analysis

This type of information is useful to know the overall maintenance of ship, and possible machinery anomalies may be identified.

Signature reduction should be the objective once knowing the noise characteristics of a ship are known, understanding that the impact on the counter-detection distance could be the difference of surviving an attack.

Noisy ships are the ‘bells’ of a fleet. Propagation models will let any navy define how noisy ships will be affected by the counter detection distances.

The portable deep water noise range (DEWARS) minimum configuration is composed by:

• A hydrophones array
• A communication buoy
• A control unit for signal acquisition and processing
• Differential global positioning system (DGPS) system for surface tracking data
  SAES is a worldwide recognised company that have supplied the latest signatures acquisition systems, which have the benefit of an efficient and innovative processing technology and high operational availability.