Research article

Design and implementation of anulus-shaped ciliary structure for four-unit MEMS vector hydrophone

¹ State Key Laboratory of Dynamic Testing Technology, Taiyuan 030051, PR China
² Department of Intelligence and Automation, Taiyuan University, Taiyuan 030032, PR China
³ Nanjing North Information Industrialization Group Co., Ltd., Nanjing 211153, PR China
⁴ Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200000, China

^* Corresponding author: zhangguojun1977@nuc.edu.cn
^a Xiaoyong Zhang and Nixin Shen contributed equally to this work.

Received: 22 December 2020
Accepted: 10 February 2021

Abstract

Inspired from fish bionics, an anulus-shaped ciliary structure for four-unit MEMS vector hydrophone (AFUVH) is proposed in this paper. It replaces the previous bionic cilium-shaped structure and becomes a novel sensing structure in the four-unit MEMS vector hydrophone (FUVH), which realizes the complete simulation of the fish lateral line neuromasts structurally and functionally. It not only improves the sensitivity of FUVH, but also retains a sufficient bandwidth, which improves the overall performance of FUVH for monitoring remote ships noise. Meanwhile, this paper theoretically analyzes the performance of AFUVH for detecting acoustic signals. ANSYS 17.0 simulation is used to derive the parameters of effective structure and optimum dimension structure of annulus-shaped ciliary structure. Finally, the experimental results show that comparing with cilium-structured FUVH, the sensitivity of AFUVH with effective structure is increased by 3.92 dB, and the sensitivity of AFUVH with optimum dimension structure is increased by 5.87 dB, reaching up to −177.53 dB.