Multibeam echosounder

Unlike other sonars and echo sounders, MBES uses beamforming to extract directional information from the returning soundwaves, producing a swathe of depth soundings from a single ping.

[1] The Sonar Array Sounding System (SASS) was developed in the early 1960s by the US Navy, in conjunction with General Instrument to map large swathes of the ocean floor to assist the underwater navigation of its submarine force.

[1] Starting in the 1970s, companies such as General Instrument (now SeaBeam Instruments, part of L3 Klein) in the United States, Krupp Atlas (now Atlas Hydrographic) and Elac Nautik (now part of the Wärtsilä Corporation) in Germany, Simrad (now Kongsberg Discovery) in Norway and RESON now Teledyne RESON A/S in Denmark developed systems that could be mounted to the hull of large ships, as well as on small boats (as technology improved, multibeam echosounders became more compact and lighter, and operating frequencies increased).

SeaBeam Classic systems were subsequently installed on the US academic research vessels USNS Thomas Washington (T-AGOR-10) (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California), the USNS Robert D. Conrad (Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University) and the RV Atlantis II (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution).

Multibeam echosounders are also commonly used for geological and oceanographic research, and since the 1990s for offshore oil and gas exploration and seafloor cable routing.

In 1989, Atlas Electronics (Bremen, Germany) installed a second-generation deep-sea multibeam called Hydrosweep DS on the German research vessel Meteor.

The older and larger, lower-frequency multibeam sonar systems, that required considerable time and effort mounting them onto a ship's hull, used conventional tonpilz-type transducer elements, which provided a usable bandwidth of approximately 1/3 octave.

Type 1-3 piezo-composite transducer elements, [4] are being employed in a multispectral multibeam echosounder to provide a usable bandwidth that is in excess of 3 octaves.

In order to determine the transmit and receive angle of each beam, a multibeam echosounder requires accurate measurement of the motion of the sonar relative to a cartesian coordinate system.