Sea mine burial prediction for naval mine countermeasures mission planning
Date
2019
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Sea mines have been used in every major conflict since the American Civil War and have sunk more combatant ships than all other means combined. Mines will continue to be a cheap, effective instrument, particularly for asymmetric forces. Consequently, all navies must possess a capability to counter enemy mining efforts to be successful. Most modern mines rest on the seabed and detect passing ships based on influence sensors, as opposed to older mines that floated in the water column and relied on enemy ship contact to detonate. Bottom mines can be difficult to detect with many of today’s sonar systems, especially when they become partially or completely buried. Understanding bottom mine burial is critical to successful mine countermeasures mission planning, but burial prediction has historically contained large margins of error. ☐ Sea mine burial has been studied intermittently since the end of World War II, with renewed interest and sustained efforts from 2000 through the present. The Office of Naval Research (ONR), in coordination with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), funded the Mine Burial Program (MBP) in 2000 with the goal of improving mine burial prediction models. The improved models were integrated into new mine burial programs, such as the Mine Burial Expert System (MBES) and the Deterministic Mine Burial Prediction (DMBP) program. The main output of both programs is time-dependent mine burial predictions. The scour model developed for DMBP was used to generate predictions of mine burial for specific wave conditions and sediment sizes. The data were analyzed to determine principles for burial prediction and the relative importance of environmental parameters in predicting mine burial. ☐ In addition to the scour model burial prediction analysis, the full DMBP program was used to produce graphical burial prediction products which facilitated the development of a Burial Dominance Line (BDL). The BDL depicts the approximate offshore location where significant mine burial is expected to occur for specific geographic locations. ☐ The results from the scour model data showed wave forcing conditions have a much stronger role in determining mine burial at a particular water depth than sediment grain size. Additionally, the range of possible burial percentages (0-100%) was skewed towards minimal burial (0-20%) or maximum burial (75%-100%). The number of depths experiencing 20%-75% burial was found to only occur for an average of 22% of the number of depths that experience greater than 75% burial. The finding of this narrow range of intermediate burial depths inferred confidence in the concept of a BDL predicting either no/minimal burial or significant/complete burial sections within a given area. ☐ Analysis of the DMBP burial prediction results showed increased variability between annual averages than between month to month averages for a specific case. When plotting the BDL, there were pronounced differences in the offshore location of the seasonal BDL between summer and winter, sometimes tripling the BDL offshore distance in some locations. ☐ The BDL was found to be a simple tool for quickly understanding the mine burial threat to improve the MCM planning process. Utilizing DMBP with additional scripts and functions developed during this research, graphical BDL products for specific areas can be quickly created and sent to forward operating MCM forces to be incorporated into mission planning.