IIT Delhi working with Navy to build active Sonar classifiers for submarines

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, and Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) are jointly developing new Active Sonar classifiers for Indian submarines which will help the navy differentiate between enemy submarines and friendly ones and the sophisticated equipment will undergo trials by the end of this year.

"We have a technician from BEL who is stationed at IIT Delhi right now who will take the technology from us. We are testing it for them. They will incorporate our system in their existing Sonar technology and then we are hoping by the end of this year they will go in for trials of the system," said Prof Rajendra Bahl of Centre for Applied Research Electronics at IIT Delhi.

Prof. Bahl along with Lt. Cdr Akshay R Prabhu and Prof. Arun Kumar have developed this technology which will help the Naval force make a concrete difference between friendly and hostile submarines while keeping a vigil.

"Our department has been working on Defence-oriented projects and we also train students from the Navy and DRDO. These students enroll themselves for the masters programme and do projects which are directly related to Defence. We also get our funding from Defence for research projects. We widely work in Sonars," said Prof Bahl.

In the new Sonar systems, the echo returned by the targets are insonified by sonar pings which are analyzed. It is the analysis of the returned echo which forms the backbone of target classification. The echos are directly related to the physical characteristics of the targets in question. The characteristics of the Echo envelope provides the means to accurately determine size, shape and composition information about targets from the features present in their scattering across sections.

"Such projects developed by us have been manufactured and used by the Navy, which has gained a lot from our projects," said Prof Bahl.