Abstract:Electromagnetic pulse sound source (boomer) is a commonly used explosion sound source in marine seismic exploration, and the deep-sea application of such explosion sound source needs to solve cavitation suppression problem. In this paper, a deep sea boomer source based on pressure compensation balance is proposed. A boomer transducer with a maximum working pressure of 20.0 MPa is developed and tested in a high-pressure anechoic tank. Through the analysis of the hydrophone outputs under different energy and pressure levels, it can be seen that an air sac with the initial pressure of 0.5 MPa can effectively balance the internal and external pressure of the transducer, solve the problem of cavitation suppression, and realize the excitation of broadband pulse sound waves. The repeatability of the acoustic wave is very good, and the minimum correlation coefficient is to 0.986. With the increase of working pressure from 0.5 MPa to 20.0 MPa, the main change in acoustic characteristics is the amplitude attenuation (204.6 dB to 194.2 dB) and width compression (182 μs to 88 μs), and the main frequency (2.3 kHz as the center) slightly shifted to high frequency. Compared with the hydrophone output in the process of pressure rising and downing in the high-pressure anechoic tank, it can be seen that the repeatability of the acoustic wave is better. The higher the pressure, the better the waveform consistency, indicating that the boomer transducer based on pressure compensation balance has a more stable performance under high pressure environment.