THE US navy wants to protect its warships with a system that will destroy incoming torpedoes by firing massive underwater shock waves at them.
The ships would be equipped with arrays of 360 transducers each 1 metre square – effectively big flat-panel loudspeakers – running along either side of the hull below the waterline. When the ship’s sonar detects an incoming torpedo, the transducers simultaneously fire an acoustic shock wave of such intensity that the torpedo either detonates early or is disabled by the pulse’s crushing force, according to the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is funding the project.
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