SBIR-STTR Award

The objective of the proposed work is to design, fabricate and test inexpensive (nominally expendable) water property measurement systems (SWANs) to provide environmental optical parameters in the surfzone that are critical for MCM operations. Work will build on recent technological advances, including recent development of attenuation, scattering, and backscattering sensors for AUVs and other compact platforms. A SWAN (Surfzone Water Attenuation Node) will have a newly designed sensor (the BAM3) measuring multi-spectral attenuation, c, at 470, 532, and 660 nm, as well as GPS and RF communications. SWANs will be able to operate as drifters or as moored packages and will be capable of intelligent networking. A goal is to achieve a cost factor of $1K for the BAM3 and $2K for the SWAN. A SWAN-x version will also be developed that will additionally have recently developed sensors measuring total scattering (AUV-B) and multi-wavelength backscattering (ECO-BB3), thus providing the IOPs attenuation, scattering, absorption, and backscattering.

Keywords:
Optical Properties, Surfzone, Attenuation, Scattering, Backscattering, Mcm Eoid, Visibility, Performance Prediction

An inherently scalable solution for determining optical properties important for surfzone mine-countermeasures (MCM) and basic research will be developed. Our approach is to develop a nominally expendable SWAN (Surfzone Water Attenuation Node) drifter that will measure beam attenuation, log GPS, and wirelessly telemeter this data using inexpensive wi-fi technology. An extended version, the SWAN-M drifter, will also be equipped with a 17-angle volume scattering function device called the MASCOT, specifically modified for this application. Optical data will be inverted to provide compositional information about particle fields.

Keywords:
Surfzone Drifter, Attenuation, Scattering, Particle Composition, Inversion