How does a Submarine Sonar's work?

Question

I wanted to know about the ping etc, and why there are so many different sounding pings?

Answer 1

well, u got guy pings and girl pings. U can't tell what s*x a sub is by just looking at it.

Answer 2

You are refereing to what is called Active Sonar. Active Sonar sends out a transmission and listens for the return (echo) from contacts, the bottom, or surface. Using the Speed of sound in the water and knowing the time difference you can get a very accurate range.

The reasons for different types of pulses is dependant on what the objective is. For shallow water and mapping High Frequency gives good details. But HF has very short ranges, it attenuates (looses energy due to heat transfer) very quickly. So for longer range detection a lower frequency is used, but this not have the resolution of HF. Now the specific pulse types (different sounding pings) vary on several factors I cannot get into, but different pulses have uses for differing situations, but a big factor is doppler (apparant frequency shift due to speed of the transmitting or target platform). Some of the Pulse types used are CW (Continuos Wave) FM (Frequency Modulated).

Answer 3

The vessel send out a beam (ping) which resounds around the outside of the vessel. This beam , once it hits an obstacle in it's path , echoes back to the Sub. The crew can then distinguish it's range and depth.

It's far more technical than this simple explanation though.

Answer 4

That works on high frequency sound and

pinging noise sent thru the water.

This website info can give you a start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar

With links to the other information on the web

you are looking for.

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Answer 5

It sends sound waves out into the water, in different waves, which is what gives the lines on the monitor. When these sound waves hit a submarine/rock/whale they bounce of it and Head back to the submarine, where it is picked up. This allows it to determine that ere is something there and how far away it is by how long it took for the ping to return.

as for the actual ping noise, that's just movie magic...

Answer 6

The early sonars, invented by the English the help with North Atlantic Convoys during the second world war, were called ASDIC and that meant it was named after the Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee. And the pings were really that loud, not movie magic. The "ping" was a high pitched high frequency sound wave, which carries in water much better than through the air (which is why there is no airbourn Sonar. This sound is carried to the object or the sea bed, knowing the frequency of the sound determins how fast it travels through the water, this gives a distance from the sea bed, any early returns of the "ping" would mean an object is above the sea bed, maybe a whale orr a submarine. In the early days this would have been backed up by a device rather like an ear trumpet which would be in the water, by turning the trumpet towards the object you could determine if it was man made or natural, ie does it have an engine sound, you can also fix a bearing on the object in this way.

I hope this helps