Navy Develops Highly Persistent Undersea Hydrophone System Powered By Ocean Temperatures
The Persistent Smart Acoustic Profiler Voyager could make underwater listening cheaper, more flexible, and more persistent for the sea service.
Geoff Ziezulewicz
Posted on Feb 6, 2025
Developed through a collaboration between NPS and Seatrec, the Persistent Smart Acoustic Profiler (PSAP) Voyager is pictured just after it is deployed in the Pacific off the coast of Kona, Hawaii, in November of 2024. The innovative, self-powered autonomous underwater drone represents a major breakthrough in the persistent collection of acoustic data in real-time. (Photo courtesy Tarry Rago)
The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) has helped develop an autonomous underwater float that can monitor and transmit oceanographic and underwater acoustic data near-indefinitely, and in near real-time. Known as the Persistent Smart Acoustic Profiler (PSAP) Voyager, it is powered by temperature differences in the ocean, providing enough energy to run its instrumentation for far longer than other non-wired undersea eavesdropping hydrophones currently in operation. Such an innovation could have big implications for undersea sensing and detection.
Capabilities like PSAP Voyager could prove doubly useful if operationalized for tactical means at a time when the U.S. Navy fleet is being eclipsed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Providing a highly flexible and rapidly deployable hydrophone system that can persist for long periods without any infrastructure could prove invaluable in this context.
The Navy announced PSAP Voyager’s milestone this week. Neither the service nor Seatrec, the manufacturer, responded to questions about the drone by TWZ’s deadline Thursday.
PSAP Voyager generates enough electricity via “ocean energy thermal conversion” to power onboard computing capabilities for processing the reams of data picked up by its passive acoustics, according to the company, which partnered with NPS in 2022 for the Voyager effort.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/navy-develops-highly-persistent-undersea-hydrophone-system-powered-by-ocean-temperatures
