Design and analysis of a multiple sensor units vector hydrophone

Inspired by the hairy structure of fish neuromast, a multiple sensor units (multi-unit) vector hydrophone is proposed in the paper, which integrates multiple sensor units on one chip according to bionics. Its sensitivity and signal noise ratio (SNR) are theoretically analyzed compared with the hydrophone which has only one sensor unit. In order to verify the correctness of the theory, a 4-unit vector hydrophone has been fabricated. For experiments, the comparative calibration experiment is used to validate the theoretical analysis of sensitivity and fast fourier transform algorithm (FFT) is used to process the experiment data to verify the theoretical analysis of SNR. The results show that the sensitivity of the 4-unit hydrophone is improved by 11.8 dB and the SNR is improved by 1.9 dB on average, which is correlated with the theoretical analysis.