A Sensory Instrumented Particle for Environmental Monitoring Applications: Development and Calibration

Assessing and Modelling the Interactions of Instrumented Particles with Bed Surface at Low Transport Conditions

“…A set of well-controlled laboratory flume experiments have been designed and carried out using in-house developed instrumented particle devices (similar to [46][47][48][49]), to better understand what controls coarse sediment transport hopping dynamics downstream gravel-bed rivers. Below, the details of the experimental test section, equipment, and matrix are offered.…”

“…Flow sensing and transport processes monitoring and instrumentation have gained increasing attention following the relatively recent technological advancements in the field of micro-electromechanical sensors (MEMS) that make it possible to record Lagrangian observations of individual sediment particles [39][40][41][42][43][44][45] and shed light on the dynamics of sediment transport processes at an extraordinary resolution and with high precision fused inertial measurement units, IMUs (e.g., via the use of robust and accurate accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers) [46][47][48]. Instrumented particles with a range of such sensors can be placed on the riverbed surface to simulate the response of light natural pebbles, exposed to a flow field that can set these into motion downstream a river.…”

“…This has not been an issue for controlled lab experiments, but it may become a constraint for long periods of field deployment, affecting the useful logging durations that can be achieved or requiring a compromise in terms of the number and frequency of data being logged. Novel miniaturized instrumented particles equipped with high precision accelerometer and gyroscope sensors have also been developed, recording time series of acceleration and angular displacement, finding application for the monitoring of bed surface destabilization [47,49], and monitoring low mobility bedload transport conditions [48].…”

“…Researchers [13,37,[51][52][53][54] have studied sediment transport in a probabilistic context and attempted to relate it to the hydrodynamic properties of turbulent flows, while considering sediment transport at the particle scale. As a universally accepted criterion that robustly explains this dynamical process and stochasticity does not yet exist, the stochastic description of sediment transport dynamics at a high resolution using MEMS appears to be attractive [48].…”

“…A magnetometer for orientation sensing relatively to the earth's gravitational field, a triaxial accelerometer for measuring particle accelerations (±16 g), and gyroscopes recording the rotations around the axis of the particle's local coordinate system (at a range of ±2000 • /s) comprise the IMU. All these data can be fused (as shown in [48]) and are recorded at 200 Hz. A microcontroller is used to take data from the sensor and writes these to the external memory (microSD) from where the data can be downloaded to a personal computer for further analysis.…”