Adaptive Beamforming of a Towed Array during Maneuvering

During maneuvering, the performance of Minimum Variance Distortion-less Response (MVDR) beamforming for a towed hydrophone array will greatly degrade due to shape error. Under the assumption that the shape of a towed array changes in a known way during the observation interval, an improved MVDR method is proposed. A static array with average shape during the observation interval is taken as a reference array shape. The phase difference of the cross spectral density matrix (CSDM) between the time-varying array and the reference array is compensated on each azimuth. A coherent CSDM accumulation can then be achieved. Experimental results show that the improved MVDR method can yield better performance than conventional MVDR with a time-varying array. This helps to resolve the problems of left-right target ambiguity and weak signal detection for time-varying arrays.