Construction and testing of compact low noise hydrophones with extended frequency response

Abstract

A simple low-noise hydrophone design with internal preamplifier is presented. This design is similar to published designs and is a variation of the design developed in the NPS thesis by Miguel Alvarado [2003], except that several improvement features are included. These include a simplification of the structure and its modes of vibration, a large reduction in package diameter and the effect its acoustic diffraction has on the sensitivity, and an extended upper frequency response of 42 kHz resulting from the simplified structure and reduced diameter. Furthermore, the modified geometry along with its orientation in the water should produce a very omni-directional response in the horizontal plane at the higher frequencies. Finally, an new feedback preamplifier design developed by Hofler and Alvarado was discovered to have some subtle but serious performance problems. These problems were resolved in this research and the resulting preamplifier performance was tested and documented herein.