General Dynamics Canada announced its continued advancements in the development and integration of naval ISR technologies with the opening of its Underwater ISR Centre of Excellence, the release of a Mine Avoidance Sonar System in partnership with Marport C-Tech Ltd and a contract award to continue its in-service support with the Swedish navy.
The expansion of General Dynamics Canada’s naval ISR offering addresses increasing global requirements in anti-submarine warfare, mine avoidance and mine counter measures.
The ISR Centre is designed to accelerate the company’s research and product development efforts as naval fleets around the world look to re-establish this critical capability in the face of new threats.
Located in Halifax, close to key Canadian military naval and air bases, the General Dynamics UW ISR Centre of Excellence will leverage the company’s strong collaborative relationship with Defence Research and Development Canada.
This announcement also builds on the company’s 2009 partnership agreement with Marport C-Tech Ltd., to jointly develop and market a suite of next-generation underwater acoustic products to support underwater military ISR missions.
“Underwater ISR capabilities are critical to the success of today’s littoral naval missions,” said David Ibbetson, general manager of General Dynamics Canada.
“The General Dynamics Canada UW ISR Centre of Excellence will enable us to collaborate, innovate and accelerate the development of solutions to ensure naval personnel have the appropriate tools and information to sense and respond to underwater threats when they need them.”
The UW ISR Centre of Excellence will be integrated into the company’s state-of-the-art 46,000 square foot facility in Halifax.
The centre will be staffed by an integrated team of hardware and software engineers and experts in underwater acoustics and naval sonar operations.
The team’s initial focus will be further development of the company’s flagship acoustic products, which include the MATADOR Torpedo Detection System and the new TrailBlazer Mine and Obstacle Avoidance Sonar.
TrailBlazer is a high-frequency, high-resolution sonar system specifically designed for mine and obstacle avoidance (MOAS) on patrol vessels, corvettes, frigates and destroyers operating in littoral waters.
TrailBlazer combines wideband transmissions, high directivity and an advanced operator interface to provide superior detection capability against mines and other threats to shallow-water operations
“With 250,000 sea mines in the inventories of over 50 navies worldwide, mines represent an ever-increasing threat to coastal and waterway security, especially in littoral waters,” said David Ibbetson, vice president and general manager of General Dynamics Canada.
“TrailBlazer’s power, range and resolution make it a very effective solution against such underwater littoral mine threats.”
The product is a result of a co-development effort between General Dynamics Canada and Marport.
Marport is a leading developer of advanced sonar technology for commercial and military applications.
TrailBlazer combines Marport’s highly-flexible Software-Defined Sonar transceiver with General Dynamics’ open architecture, digital signal processing suite and graphical user interfaces.
The TrailBlazer sonar detects surface, moored and seabed mines and provides high resolution real-time 3-D forward-looking sonar capability for safe navigation. The high directivity achieved through the narrow horizontal receive beams and variable horizontal transmission sector make the TrailBlazer sonar well-suited for use in mine and obstacle avoidance in shallow water with highly variable topography.
The company also announced recently that it has been awarded an engineering support contract by SAAB AB for the continued integration of the Hydra multi-sensor sonar system on the Swedish navy’s newest Visby-class corvettes.
In 1997, the Swedish Defense Material Administration selected General Dynamics as the prime contractor, system designer and integrator of Hydra.
Under the new award from SAAB, General Dynamics will continue to provide software system integration for the latest release of the Hydra software suite.
“We are pleased to have been selected by SAAB, Sweden’s in-country, in-service support provider, to continue our work on the second phase of this important program for Sweden,” said David Ibbetson, vice president and general manager of General Dynamics Canada.
“General Dynamics Canada looks forward to continuing our relationship with SAAB and to providing ongoing engineering support and enhancements to the operational capabilities of the Visby class and the Swedish navy.”
The Hydra multi-sensor sonar system provides both anti-submarine warfare and mine counter-measure capabilities to the Visby-class corvettes, both in open ocean as well as in the Baltic, which is considered to be among the most acoustically challenging waters in the world.
The system integrates multiple subsystems into a single, streamlined architecture that supports variable depth sonar, hull-mounted sonar, towed array sonar, remotely operated sonar, own noise monitoring, sonobuoy receivers, underwater environment monitoring and three-dimensional underwater terrain modeling.
By streamlining sensor data through a single architecture, Hydra provides an integrated view of the underwater warfare space, enabling the Visby-class corvettes to quickly adopt a variety of strategic roles and adapt to changing in-field conditions.