Wireless Remote Monitoring of Geotechnical Systems

Landslides, lateral spreading and other similar forms of ground failures due to natural disasters are often catastrophic primarily because they occur without much warning. As our society becomes ever more complex and urban areas continue to spread, the economic and societal costs of landslides and other ground failures will continue to rise. Although over the last two decades our understanding of the mechanisms of failure and large ground deformation due to rains, floods and earthquakes has improved considerably, the obvious goal of significantly reducing losses remains elusive. This state of affairs stems from the limitations of existing real-time sensing and monitoring tools as well as inadequate predictive capabilities of current computational models. Real-time monitoring programs are essential to develop warning systems of impending danger from active landslides in any site specific or regional hazard program. The current state-of-the-art in real-time monitoring of active slopes is either based on very expensive monitoring systems or on measurement of ground surface displacements. The work presented in this paper constitutes a major step in the direction of establishing a low cost wireless remote monitoring system for active ground. A ShapeAccelArray sensor is being developed, taking advantage of promising new advances in the fiber optic and micro-machined electromechanical sensor (MEMS) technologies. This sensor array is capable of simultaneously measuring 2D soil acceleration and 3D permanent ground deformation down to tens of meters of depth. This paper presents the preliminary design of the new sensor array as well as preliminary results from tests aimed at validating and calibrating the accelerations and displacements measured with this sensor array.