It can be a difficult problem to precisely predict the sound field radiated from a finite elastic structure in shallow water channel because of its strong coupling with up-down boundaries and the fluid medium, whose sound field cannot be calculated directly by current methods, such as Ray theory, normal mode theory and other different methods, which are adaptable to sound fields from idealized point sources in waveguide. So far, there is no reliable prediction method to solve this kind of problem. A combined wave superposition method is proposed for such a problem, which combines the traditional wave superposition method with the transfer function in shallow water channel and the multi-physics field coupling numerical model. This method mainly consists of three sections: 1) obtaining the normal velocity on the elastic structure surface in shallow water channel by the finite element method (FEM), whose FEM model includes the up-down boundaries and the completely absorbent sound boundaries in the horizontal direction; 2) getting the equivalent point source strength by traditional wave superposition method; 3) calculating the total sound field by adding up each point source field which is obtained by normal mode method. This method is verified by numerical simulation and theoretical analysis by using an imaginary and elastic spherical sound source respectively, and the results demonstrate that the method is valid and has high precision and calculating efficiency. The acoustic radiation characteristics from elastic cylindrical shells is investigated for different acoustic radiation sources, ocean environments and measurements. The cylindrical shell material is steel, whose radius and length are 3 m and 30 m respectively. The shallow water channel is an ideal waveguide with 50 m in depth, at the upper boundary, i.e., the free surface, the lower boundary is the Neumann boundary, i.e., the normal derivative of the acoustic pressure should be zero. The analysis frequency range is from 30 Hz to 200 Hz. The results show that due to a significant coupling effect of up-down direction boundaries on the sound field, the elastic structure can be equivalent to the point source only in low frequency and far field. The spatial field directivity distribution is more obvious at high frequency. The acoustic power measured by vertical line arrayis greatly influenced by ocean boundary and the depth of target.

The transfer function method is a common method for establishing a traveling wave field in a sound tube to measure the reflection and transmission coefficient of underwater material. The voltage applied to the secondary sound source can be calculated in accordance with the transfer matrix between the sound sources and hydrophones, then a traveling wave field can be established in the sound tube. However, the transfer function must be remeasured when the measurement frequency needs to be changed. A checking procedure of the traveling wave field in the sound tube is essential before measuring underwater acoustic material. If it is not an accurate traveling wave field, the secondary sound source signal should be corrected until the traveling wave field meets the requirements. To address these problems, an adaptive control method for generating plane traveling waves is proposed. The phase difference of sound pressures measured using the two hydrophones between the secondary sound source and the sample is used as the objective function in the adaptive algorithm, and the amplitude and phase of the secondary sound source can be obtained using the adaptive control system in the frequency domain. When a traveling wave field is formed, the reflection and transmission coefficient of the sample can be measured at the same time. With this method, the procedure of testing the traveling wave field is omitted. If the state of the primary sound source changes, the signal form of the secondary sound source can be changed immediately. Therefore, the efficiency of material measurement is improved. Theoretically, this method can obtain the most matching signal form of the secondary sound source, such that the accuracy of this method is remarkably high. Simulation and experimental results in this paper show that the measurement accuracy is reliable within the frequency range of 100–2500 Hz.

In order to get a deeper research on the underwater acoustic transducer array and obtain the radiation impedance quickly and accurately, a measurement method based on near-field acoustic holography (NAH) for impedance characteristics of underwater acoustic planer array has been proposed. Using this method, the self-/inter-radiation impedance characteristics of the source plane can be obtained by the sound source surface information which has been reconstructed by NAH. For illustration, based on the NAH principle measurement model for planar array impedance characteristic, a five-element linear array and a nine-element planar array were used to numerically analyze this measurement method. And the pool test of the very low frequency transmitting transducer is carried out. Both of the numerical simulation results and the experiment results show that the NAH measurement method proposed by this paper has certain feasibility in measuring the impedance characteristics of the transducer.