Abstract
This article presents a new wireless seismic sensor network system, especially design for building monitoring. The designed prototype allows remote control, and remote and real-time monitoring of the recorded signals by any internet browser. The system is formed by several Nodes (based on the CC3200 microcontroller of Texas Instruments), which are in charge of digitizing the ambient vibrations registered by three-component seismic sensors and transmitting them to a central server. This server records all the received signals, but also allows their real-time visualization in several remote client browsers thanks to the JavaScript’s Node.js technology. The data transmission uses not only Wi-Fi technology, but also the existing network resources that nowadays can be found usually in any official or residential building (lowering deployment costs). A data synchronization scheme was also implemented to correct the time differences between the Nodes, but also the long-term drifts found in the internal clock of the microcontrollers (improving the quality of records). The completed system is a low-cost, open-hardware and open-software design. The prototype was tested in a real building, recording ambient vibrations in several floors and observing the differences due to the building structure.
Highlights
The degree of building damage caused by earthquakes is strongly related to the soil characteristics and the dynamic behavior of the structures [1]
The fundamental frequency can be estimated by the standard spectral ratio (SSR) technique, calculating the spectral ratio of the horizontal components registered on the top floor and the same components registered on the ground floor [21]
In this work we developed a wireless seismic acquisition system capable of displaying the sensor signal in real time and at low cost
Summary
The degree of building damage caused by earthquakes is strongly related to the soil characteristics (local site effects) and the dynamic behavior of the structures [1]. Once the data is recorded, it is subsequently processed to estimate the building properties, such as the fundamental frequency [14,15] Some of these techniques are the horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratio (H/V or HVSR) [16,17,18] and the standard spectral ratio (SSR) [19]. In the case of the H/V method, the spectral ratio between the average of the two horizontal components and the vertical component, measured on the highest level of the structure, provides an estimation of the resonant frequency of the monitored building structure [11,20]. The fundamental frequency can be estimated by the SSR technique, calculating the spectral ratio of the horizontal components (longitudinal and transversal) registered on the top floor and the same components registered on the ground floor [21]
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