Submarine Tracking Tech

I read a few interesting tidbits in the article below



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Blue light LIDAR could scan through hundreds of meters of water.

"And being metal, submarines have an effect on the Earth’s magnetic field, another potential giveaway. Flying drones equipped with new sorts of magnetometer could make submarine-hunting easier."

"Employing longer wavelengths of sound than most sonars, and taking advantage of lightning-fast processing power, it is possible to create time-lapse movies of sea life (and presumably submarines) over tens of thousands of square kilometres."

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It's interesting as it could render current submarine fleets obsolete.

AndrewS said:

I read a few interesting tidbits in the article below

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Blue light LIDAR could scan through hundreds of meters of water.

"And being metal, submarines have an effect on the Earth’s magnetic field, another potential giveaway. Flying drones equipped with new sorts of magnetometer could make submarine-hunting easier."

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It's interesting as it could render current submarine fleets obsolete.

Click to expand...

But doesn't modern submarines has a rubber coating to absorb or deflect most of it?

The Rubberized coating Is mostly for sound. MAD or Magnetic Anomaly detectors on AIrcraft have been used for decades so nothing new there Even Titanium hulled Russian Subs still leave a Magnetic signature. The Blue LIDAR is a cool idea but?

Russian Subs still leave a Magnetic signature

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Very few classes build Alfa, Papa, Mike, Sierra coz very difficult to weld.
Titanium less detectable to MAD

To what range in average a MAD can detect a sub ?

Aren't anechoic tiles optimised for specific frequency ranges? Would they work against ULF sonar frequencies? Plus submarines would presumably disrupt fish movements and leave a trail in the ocean.

Yes, MAD detectors have been used for a long time, but the latest ones are more sensitive/cheaper and can be combined with greater processing power to identify differences against the existing known magnetic landscape.

Come to think of it, wake detection and thermal signatures (for nuclear submarines) may also be viable detection methods given the same improvements in processing power and infra-red/radar sensors.

Blue LIDAR on an airborne drone could theoretically scan most of the South China Seas in a single sortie.

But of course, we will be amongst the last to know exactly what has been developed and how effective it is.

Blue LIDAR detection should be straightforward to implement to 200m.

That would cover the Taiwan Straits, the Yellow Sea and much of the ECS.

Titanium Is non Magnetic, but the interior outfitting still uses a lot of Ferric metals especially in the reactor.
detection range however has been limited basically you have to fly over it to see it with that.

Yes, but if you pair up very sensitive spin-exchange relaxation free (SERF) magnetometers with an airborne drone, that covers a lot of ocean. Particularly in the shallow waters off the Chinese coastline.

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It does look like the magnetometer fabrication process has a lot of similarities with MEMS production for guidance systems.

And that a number of new MEMS foundries in China have just been completed.

Plus back in 2013, Physicsworld reported that

"Mike Romalis, Dong Sheng and colleagues at Princeton University in the US and Zhejiang University of Science and Technology in China have developed the most sensitive and tiny scalar atomic magnetometer to date, which does not need to be shielded."

AndrewS said:

Blue LIDAR detection should be straightforward to implement to 200m.

That would cover the Taiwan Straits, the Yellow Sea and much of the ECS.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't take the hundreds of meters seriously.
Basically any image caught is a reflection from the sun since there are no light source down below meaning you have to double the distance that light requires to travel.

I wouldn't take the hundreds of meters seriously.
Basically any image caught is a reflection from the sun since there are no light source down below meaning you have to double the distance that light requires to travel.

Click to expand...

Hundreds of metres is a credible figure even if you have to double the distance.

The Economist have used it, plus there is a TED talk which quotes:

"So if you think about it, the ocean is 71 percent of the planet,and blue light can extend down to almost a 1,000 meters."

A chart of light wavelength versus distance is shown at 2min56seconds into this video