Battelle, teamed with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and sonar developer EdgeTech Marine, has demonstrated a proof-of-concept technology for scanning both sides of a ship’s submerged hull during transit in port environment to be able to check to see if weapons of mass destruction, mines, and bundles of illegal drugs may be attached. The Harbor Shield demonstration took place over the summer in Narragansett Bay, R.I., and was used to scan the hulls on vessels as small as a 30-foot skiff with an anomaly of about 1-foot in diameter attached, Lynn Faulkner, program manager for Battelle’s Equipment Development Group, tells TR2. Currently few ship and boat hulls are examined for potential threats except where intelligence points to the need for an inspection. In that case, a vessel is typically required to anchor at some area away from the dock so that divers can manually screen the hull for anomalies, a time consuming process and one that interrupts the flow of commerce. With Harbor Shield Battelle eventually hopes to dramatically speed the scanning process up by imaging ship’s hulls–and automatically comparing the image against images of the same hull stored in a database–in transit near a port and providing automatic alerts should there be a need for a secondary inspection. In this case divers can be directed specifically to where the anomaly is located, Faulkner says. The database of hull images would be created by Harbor Shield. In the next phase of the program, Battelle and its teammates are making refinements to the sonar and will do a full-scale demonstration next summer in the same estuary. Faulkner says that the full-scale demo will hopefully lead to the design of a commercial system for an operational port demonstration in the 2010-11 timeframe. The eventual goal is to be able to scan entire harbors for every boat and swimmer. Faulkner says there is interest in the technology from the Coast Guard, military and commercial entities. The system could also be used to provide benchmarks for ship hull maintenance. Battelle is the system integrator on the project.