A Computer-Aided Data Acquisition System for Multichannel Seismic Monitoring and Recording

This paper presents an innovative approach based on hardware and software to develop a multichannel seismic monitoring and data acquisition embedded system. The hardware was designed by using basic electronic components and integrated circuits. It consists of two parts, signal processing and microcontroller circuits. The signal processing circuit is a combination of preamplifier, low-pass filter, gain control, high-pass filter, dc offset, and clipper circuits. The proposed data acquisition system is able to record data at a sampling rate of 300 μs, with 10-bit resolution. It has three modes: real-time monitoring, continuous recording, and seismic refraction. The detected seismic signals were filtered using analog filters, which are low pass with 1 kHz and high pass with 2 Hz. A universal serial bus was utilized to communicate between the hardware and the personal computer. A graphical user interface based on windows operating system was developed using Microsoft.NET Framework for transferring, processing, and analyzing the data. The system was tested and experimental results showing the performance of the proposed system were presented. Earth scientists can use this system for educational seismic experiments. It can be easily modified and used for other engineering applications.