Improving Broadband Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler with Orthogonal Coprime Pulse Pairs and Robust Chinese Remainder Theorem

Abstract

Broadband acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs) are instruments that are widely used in underwater observation. However, conventional broadband ADCPs face the problem of being limited in accuracy due to velocity ambiguity. This paper proposes a method based on using orthogonal coprime pulse pairs and the robust Chinese remainder theorem to mitigate this limitation. The proposed method breaks through the limit of velocity ambiguity of conventional broadband ADCP and improves the performance significantly. The simulations show that our proposed method can decrease the standard deviation of current velocity measurement by nearly three time, when compared to the conventional method.