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Reinforced earth structures are commonly used to construct earth structures with high inclination angles. The stability and safety of such constructions is highly dependent on the strain distribution of the geogrids inside the earth structure. In this article, we report about the development and implementation of a structural monitoring system to measure the strain distribution of geogrids with high accuracy and high spatial resolution. The system was developed for the Semmering Base Tunnel project in Austria but can also be applied to other reinforced earth structures. The Semmering Base Tunnel is one of the core infrastructure projects in central Europe. Prior to the start of the actual tunnel excavation, comprehensive preparatory works in the alpine landscape were necessary. One of these works included the relocation of a river stream at the disposal site Longsgraben. To establish this relocation, a reinforced earth structure with a total length of more than 1.3 km and heights up to 25 m was constructed. To evaluate the stability of this structure, a monitoring system was developed. This monitoring system is thereby based on external geodetic and internal distributed fiber optic measurements. For the latter, about 2 km of Brillouin sensing cables in several sensor sections were installed in the project area. In this paper, we report about the laboratory experiments to determine strain and temperature coefficients for the conversion of the measured Brillouin frequency shifts into strain or temperature values. Furthermore, the long-term behavior of the monitoring structure is analyzed for the period of 1 year after installation.

This study presents a new method of precise altimeter absolute calibration using a dedicated microwave transponder, which acts as an altimeter signal repeater that can be deployed at any sub-track position both in coastal regions and inland. The Austrian Academy of Sciences operates an altimeter transponder at the Gavdos calibration/validation facility located beneath a Jason cross-over point.We discuss the capabilities and strengths of the transponder technique in general and in the particular case of a dedicated calibration campaign carried out in 2011. For the accomplishment of this campaign, including 26 ascending and descending Jason-2 passes, the onboard Poseidon-3 altimeter had to be switched to the DIODE/DEM mode for every overflight. Four different methods have been developed to analyze the transponder generated waveforms, provided by S-IGDR and S-GDR products, respectively.The resulting biases of the altimetric ranges have proven to be stable (3 mm rms) and agree to a large extent among the proposed algorithms. However, the absolute bias value of 25.8 ± 0.3 cm derived from the transponder calibration technique shows a significant deviation of several centimeters compared with the ones resulting from conventional techniques. Possible causes of this behavior are under further investigation.

Purpose -Though Mobile Banking has raised high expectations in research and practice, it neither experienced broad adoption nor allows it banks to realize additional earnings yet. By analyzing the discourse in form of publications in research and practice as a proxy for the subsequent actual adoption, the purpose of this paper