Submarine Target Strength

Application ID: 90091


The primary defense of a submarine lies in its capacity to remain hidden during operation. As radio waves are strongly absorbed by seawater, sound navigation ranging, or sonar, is one of the main methods used for the detection of submarines. Sonar systems are also used for underwater exploration as well as in the fishing industry.

Designers analyze the way acoustic waves are reflected in order to minimize the equivalent reflecting area of the submarine. The target strength, or TS, is a measure of the area of a sonar target. This tutorial presents a simplified method to analyze the TS of the benchmark target echo strength simulation (BeTTSi) benchmark submarine.

This model is acoustically large and takes advantage of the stabilized formulation in the Pressure Acoustic, Boundary Elements interface (BEM). Enabling the stabilized formulation ensures convergence for large models (high frequency or large domains) at the cost of some additional degrees of freedom.

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: