Electro-Mechanical Design of a Vacuum Chamber With Vibration and Noise Damping Capabilities on an Autonomous Undersea Vehicle

This paper presents the development of an Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (AUV) that is capable of an acoustically stealth delivery of a payload. The payload is composed of a black box noise maker and the goal of this “stealth mission” is to minimize the amplitude of the acoustic signal emitting from the noise maker. Various approaches are utilized to reduce the transmission of sound produced by the payload. The design incorporates a vacuum chamber to minimize the noise transmitted through air molecules surrounding the noise maker by removing the air. In addition to a vacuum chamber, both active and passive vibration damping techniques are considered as viable methods of vibration damping, further reducing the sound output. The applied passive damping system has the advantage of using simple mechanical devices, which provides significant advantages in the application to an undersea vehicle with power and space constraints. To complete the mission, a vacuum chamber with a passive vibration damping system was developed and tested by sending the payload through a sound measuring choke point which validated the efficiency of the proposed design.