News Review: Thales, Adelaide Uni, CSIRO among CTD winners | ADM Sep 2010
Defence materiel minister Greg Combet announced in late-July that eight CTD proposals will be funded to the tune of $13 million under Round 14 of the Capability & Technology Demonstrator (CTD) program, which is administered by DSTO. Since the program began in 1998, Defence has invested $224 million in 91 projects.
Thales Australia has won a CTD contract to develop its innovative Fibre Optic Towed Array (FOTA) sonar system.
The FOTA is ideally suited to meeting Australia’s evolving sonar requirements as an upgrade for the Collins submarine, as well as on future Anti-Submarine Warfare frigates and the Future Submarine itself, says the company.
The FOTA is based on new technology involving an electro-optic acoustic sensor producing laser signals through a thin fibre optic cable.
The same technology has also been used in the development of rapidly deployable sea-bed surveillance arrays for harbour or ship protection.
The University of Adelaide has won two CTD contracts; researchers will develop quieter diesel engine submarines and an image content search capability for improved surveillance and reconnaissance.
It is the only university to receive funding under Round 14 of the CTD program.
The University’s School of Mechanical Engineering will receive $1.12 million to develop an adaptive exhaust silencer to reduce the noise from the diesel engines used on submarines.
The Australian Centre for Visual Technologies will receive $684,000 to develop technologies that will help Defence search vast databases of video and still imagery.
Director of the Centre, Professor Anton van den Hengel, said the image search technology being developed was like “Google for images”, allowing users to search for images, using images.
School of Mechanical Engineering Senior Lecturer Dr Carl Howard said the exhaust silencer being developed for use on diesel engine submarines was a passive noise control system, not requiring the input of noise interference, and would therefore be very robust.
“The Collins Class submarines have three large diesel engines and it’s a difficult engineering problem to hide these enormous power plants so that the submarine can remain undetected,” Dr Howard said.
“The engineering acoustic problem faced is that standard exhaust silencers are designed with a compromise between the amount of noise reduction and the frequency range over which they are effective.
“The novel feature of this development is that it will provide high levels of noise reduction over a narrow frequency range, and it will automatically tune to the sound emitted by the diesel engine.”
The other successful projects include: lightweight fibre-reinforced ceramic inserts for body armour (CSIRO); a system to help Navy measure the acoustic vulnerability of its submarines and surface ships (L-3 Nautronix); a device that will enable classified material to be used on any computer system, regardless of its location (Secure Systems); an airborne radio transponder that will extend the range of UHF radios deployed with ground troops (RF Industries); and a non-contact instrument to detect and classify explosives (CSIRO).