Recently, a research paper entitled A smart fiber-optic towed hydrophone array for open-sea cruising observation by a joint team from the College of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering, the College of Underwater Acoustic Engineering and the College of Shipbuilding Engineering of Harbin Engineering University (HEU) was published in the journal The Innovation. LI Shuaichen, a doctoral candidate from the College of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering, and Associate Professor CHAI Quan are the co-first authors. Professor ZHANG Liang from the College of Underwater Acoustic Engineering and Professor ZHANG Jianzhong from the College of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering are the corresponding authors.

The HEU research team developed a distributed fibre-optic towed array, leveraging its advantages of simple structure, easy large-scale expansion and low-cost deployment. Combined with the team’s self-developed intelligent demodulation dry-end system, the work systematically demonstrates for the first time the array’s multi-functional sensing capabilities in array depth perception, shape inversion and ocean observation, and further verifies that array attitude self-sensing enhances underwater target detection performance.

The figure shows the hybrid fibre-optic towed hydrophone array with self-sensing capability for ocean wave observation and acoustic detection.

Launched in 2020 and published in partnership with Cell Press, The Innovation is a comprehensive academic journal indexed in the WOS database. It covers a wide range of disciplines including physics, chemistry, materials science, nanotechnology, biology, medicine, earth science and engineering, and aims to publish high-quality cutting-edge research and review articles. The journal recorded an impact factor of 39.5 in 2025, with a 5-year impact factor of 46.

Original paper link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266667582600281X