The potential of levee failures poses significant risks to populations living behind them. Levee monitoring using ground velocity measurements obtained from geophones has been demonstrated with the simultaneous deployment of wired geophone arrays. However, the scale of levees makes their monitoring with wired sensors a challenging task. This work reports on the development of a stand-alone geophone monitoring system for levees constructed of earthen embankments. The newly developed open-source sensor package can simultaneously measure ground velocity, conductivity, and temperature in addition to ambient atmospheric pressure and humidity. The system is fully independent of processing, power management, sensors, and data storage all contained within a single instrument. This work reports the initial experimental validation of the proposed system using a granular earthen levee in a flume under controlled erosion conditions. Data is collected and post-processed for anomaly detection; sensing capabilities, and the effect of sensor noise are discussed. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first open-source stand-alone geophone system developed and tested for the monitoring of earthen levees.

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Puja Chowdhury, Joud N. Satme, Malichi Flemming, Austin R. J. Downey, Mohamed Elkholy, Jasim Imran, and Mohammad Sadik Khan, "Stand-alone geophone monitoring system for earthen levees," Proc. SPIE 12486, Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2023, 124860T (Presented at SPIE Smart Structures + Nondestructive Evaluation: March 14, 2023; Published: 18 April 2023); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2658552.