Review of Wake Homing Simulations and Countermeasures in France

France DCN Armes Sous Marines(DCN ASM) has dedicated for more than 15 years apart of its research activities to wake study in order to develop wake homing torpedo and corresponding countermeasures technology. This paper describes briefly their work on modeling of surface vessel wakes, relevant experimentations and measurements at sea, and wake homing torpedo simulation and countermeasure. Base on the concepts of 4-wake types: spume wake, wave wake(Kelvin’s wake), pressure wake and speed wake, the simplified geometrical wake model is adopted. Several factors relevant to the model and software are considered, including the influence of sea condition on wake shape, boatsmutually crossing their wakes, depth and width of parametric
wake model depending on time and ship speed and ship type, and the torpedo acoustic head with multi-beam. The current countermeasures are compared and analyzed. It is proposed that hard-kill is the main methods to counter wake homing torpedo.