Vector hydrophone is the core equipment of underwater acoustic detection. Aiming at the problem of low sensitivity and short detection distance of existing vector hydrophone. In this paper, a hollow mushroom-like cilia sensitive structure is designed to optimize the hydrophone sensitive unit. The optimal size of the hollow mushroom-like cilia MEMS vector hydrophone (MCVH) microstructure was determined by COMSOL5.6 simulation. The hollow structure is adopted, which not only ensures the working bandwidth of the hydrophone is 20Hz-1000Hz, but also improves the sensitivity of the hydrophone by increasing the receiving area of the sound wave. The test results show that the hollow structure has obvious "8" directivity, and the pit depth of the "8" directivity larger than 40dB at 315Hz. Meantime, the sensitivity of MCVH can reach -180.9dB at 1000Hz. Compared with Ciliary MEMS vector hydrophone(CVH), the sensitivity is improved by 16.8dB.

A self-contained MEMS vector hydrophone with a scalar–vector integrated design is proposed in this paper. Compared with traditional MEMS vector hydrophones, this design solves the problem of ambiguity in the port and starboard during orientation, and also realizes the self-contained storage of acoustic signals. First, the sensor principle and structural design of the self-contained MEMS hydrophone are introduced, and then the principle of the combined beamforming algorithm is given. In addition to this, the amplitude and phase calibration method based on the self-contained MEMS vector hydrophone is proposed. Then, the sensitivity and phase calibrations of the sensor are carried out in the standing wave tube. The sensitivity of the vector channel is −182.7 dB (0 dB@1 V/$\mathsf{\mu }$Pa) and the sensitivity of the scalar channel is −181.8 dB (0 dB@1 V/$\mathsf{\mu }$Pa). Finally, an outdoor water experiment was carried out. The experimental results show that the self-contained MEMS vector hydrophone can accurately pick up and record underwater acoustics information. It realizes the precise orientation of the target by combining beamforming algorithms. The direction of arrival (DOA) error is within 5° under the outdoor experimental conditions with an SNR of 13.67 dB.

The complex and variable ocean environment introduces complex noise to the signal received by microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) vector hydrophones, which seriously affects target location. To improve the detection efficiency and broaden the application range of vector hydrophone, this paper proposed a novel modified Wavelet packet de-noising method, known as the Wavelet packet energy (WPE) de-noising method. This method utilizes Shannon entropy to determine the optimal decomposition levels of Wavelet packets, and calculates the energy of reconstructed signals in each frequency band to construct feature vectors. The Wavelet packet with the larger energy is selected to reconstruct the signal until the root mean square error of the original signal and the reconstructed signal is minimized. thereby obtaining an optimal solution. The performance of this proposed method is evaluated through both indoor and outdoor experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the developed method is effective in Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation of single frequency signals and is feasible in low signal-to-noise ratio situations. The method improves the azimuth discrimination ability of the Minimum Variance Distortionless Response algorithm, and DOA estimation errors are all within 1°. Furthermore, the indoor and outdoor experiments also demonstrate that the WPE de-noising method solves the group delay and distortion of signals caused by conventional filtering.

Ship noise observation is of great significance to marine environment research and national defense security. Acoustic stealth technology makes a variety of ship noise significantly reduced, which is a new challenge for marine noise monitoring. However, there are few high spatial gain detection methods for low-noise ship monitoring. Therefore, a high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) MEMS noise listener for ship noise detection is developed in this paper. The listener achieves considerable gain by suppressing isotropic noise in the ocean. The working principle and posterior end signal processing method of the listener are introduced in detail. A gain of 10 dB over the sound pressure detector is obtained by detecting the standard sound source. In addition, the traffic vessel noise monitoring experiment verifies that the listener can detect the ship noise. The results show that the listener has a very broad application prospect in the field of low-noise ship observation.

The principle of acoustic energy flux detection method using a single micro electromechanical system (MEMS) vector hydrophone is analyzed in this paper. The probability distribution of acoustic energy flux and the weighted histogram algorithm are discussed. Then, an improved algorithm is proposed. Based on the algorithm, the distribution range of the energy is obtained by a sliding window, the energy center of gravity in the range is considered as the result of direction of arrival (DOA) estimation, and it is proved to be the maximum likelihood estimation of the target direction. The simulation results show that, with the signal to noise ratio (SNR) from −10 dB to 10 dB, the root mean square error (RMSE) of the improved algorithm is reduced by 47.8% on average, and is more accurate in the presence of interference. The experimental results of lake test are consistent with the theory analysis and simulation results.