Keynote Papers

   doi:10.3850/978-981-07-0188-8_P099

ABSTRACT

Landslides, lateral spreading and other similar forms of ground failures due to natural disasters, such as heavy rains, floods and earthquakes, continue to be catastrophic events with extreme economic and societal costs, despite our increased understanding of the mechanisms of failure and large ground deformation, primarily because these events occur without much warning. Real-time monitoring programs are essential to develop warning systems of impending danger from active areas in any site specific or regional hazard program. Unfortunately the current state-of-the-art in real-time geotechnical monitoring is either based on very expensive monitoring systems or on periodic measurement of ground surface displacements. The evaluation, health monitoring and response prediction of soils exposed to extreme hazard conditions are on the verge of a paradigm shift due to new and less expensive sensing technologies, together with recent advances in information technology related to wireless sensors networking. This condition enables the development of innovative monitoring technologies in addition to advanced interactive modeling tools that utilize this real time monitoring data in construction, sensor-assisted design and early warning of impending failure hazard. The work presented herein highlights the development of novel, affordable sensing technologies for use in a framework to monitor, manage and ensure the safety of geotechnical infrastructure. The MEMS-based in-place inclinometer system, Measurand’s ShapeAccelArray (SAA), is now established as a sensing tool for simultaneous measurement of 3D soil acceleration and 3D ground deformation up to a depth of one hundred meters, with an accuracy of ±1.5 mm per 30 m. This system is now being further developed to include digitally integrated pore pressure measurement. Each sensor array is connected to a wireless sensor node to enable real-time monitoring as well as remote sensor configuration.

© 2012 by Geotechnical Society of Singapore (GeoSS)