Passive acoustic localisation of undersea gas seeps using beamforming

International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control

Li J., White P., Bull J., Leighton T., Roche B. & Davis J.

Passive acoustics has been identified as an important strategy to determine underwater gas emission. In this work we propose a focused MVDR algorithm based beamforming technique to enhance the SNR and so localise the gas seeps. The technique is demonstrated using an array of five hydrophones collecting data at the controlled CO2 gas release experiment. The results show that the adaptive beamformer outperforms the conventional (delay and sum) beamformer in undersea bubble localisation. Furthermore, the results with a pair of hydrophone arrays show an improvement of the localisation compared to the use of one hydrophone array.