SeaHake : The Ger­man Tor­pedo

Vayu Aerospace and Defence - - News - Sayan Majumdar

At the Euron­aval show in Oc­to­ber 2016, se­nior At­las Elek­tronik ex­ec­u­tive Wolf­gang Klose in­formed this Vayu cor­re­spon­dent that the DM2A4 See­hecht (ex­port name: SeaHake mod4), the main un­der­wa­ter weapon of the Ger­man Navy’s Type 212 sub­marines, has been pro­posed as a ‘Make in In­dia’ ini­tia­tive. The heavy­weight tor­pedo, weigh­ing 1.37 tonnes, can be launched from both sub­marines and sur­face ships. The weapon is 6.6 m long when con­fig­ured with 4 bat­tery mod­ules, and is re­spec­tively shorter when con­fig­ured withh ei­ther 3 or 2 bat­tery mod­ules, while di­am­e­ter re­mains con­stant at the stan­dard 533 mm.

De­vel­oped by At­las Elek­tronik, the SeaHake mod4 tor­pedo em­ploys fi­bre op­tic wire guid­ance in con­junc­tion with ad­vancedd sig­nals pro­cess­ing and mis­sion logic to ac­cu­rately­ately en­gage un­der­wa­ter and above-wa­ter tar­gets, and d car­ries a 255 kg PBX war­head with mag­netic in­flu­enceuence and con­tact fuses. The tor­pedo is equipped with a high fre­quency per­ma­nent mag­net mo­tor (with a closed-loopop cool­ing sys­tem in­de­pen­dent from the en­vi­ron­ment) and sil­ver zinc inc bat­tery mod­ules en­sur­ing a max­i­mum speed of 50 knots and a rangeange of over 50 km.

With a fully dig­i­tal sys­tem ar­chi­tec­ture, in­creased ncreased range and speed and its new con­for­mal ar­ray sonar with a very wide panoramic sen­sor angle as well as the ad­di­tional wake-hom­ing hom­ing sen­sor, the DM2A4/SeaHake mod 4 pro­vides greatly ad­vanced vanced per­for­mance over its pre­de­ces­sor. The hom­ing head shell is s of hy­dro­dy­namic op­ti­mised par­a­bolic shape, which aims to re­duce educe tor­pedo self­noise and cav­i­ta­tion to an ab­so­lute min­i­mum. The hom­ing head’s con­for­mal trans­ducer ar­ray per­mits de­tec­tion an­gles of ±100 de­grees in the hor­i­zon­tal and ±24 de­grees in the ver­ti­cal, there­fore sup­port­ing larger ac­qui­si­tion an­gles in com­par­i­son to tra­di­tional flat ar­rays. The wide angle ar­ray is de­signed to re­duce ma­noeu­vring when in search and re­con­nais­sance stages, there­fore also re­duc­ing self-noise and pre­serv­ing bat­tery power.

Mean­while, At­las Elek­tronik have de­vel­oped the SeaHake mod4 ER ver­sion that along with Global Po­si­tion­ing Sys­tem (GPS) guid­ance and Satel­lite Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (SATCOM) with sig­nals re­ceived through a mini periscope, en­ables the tor­pedo to

at­tain a range of 140 km.

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