An acoustic emission landslide early warning system for communities in low-income and middle-income countries

Abstract

Early warning systems for slope instability are needed to alert users of accelerating slope deformation behaviour, enable evacuation of vulnerable people, and conduct timely repair and maintenance of critical infrastructure. Communities exposed to landslide risk in low-and middle-income countries seldom currently instrument and monitor slopes to provide a warning of instability because existing techniques are complex and prohibitively expensive. Research and field trials have demonstrated conclusively that acoustic emission (AE) monitoring can be an effective approach to detect accelerating slope movements and to subsequently communicate warnings to users. The objective of this study was to develop and assess a simple, robust, low-cost AE monitoring system to warn of incipient landslides, which can be widely deployed and operated by communities globally to help protect vulnerable people. This paper describes a novel AE measurement sensor that has been designed and developed with the cost constrained to a few hundred dollars (US). Results are presented from physical model experiments that demonstrate performance of the AE system in measuring accelerating deformation behaviour, with quantifiable relationships between AE and displacement rates. Exceedance of a pre-determined trigger level of AE can be used to communicate an alarm to users in order to alert them of a slope failure. Use of this EWS approach by communities worldwide would reduce the number of fatalities caused by landslides.

Towards a standard typology of endogenous landslide seismic sources

“…AEs are high-frequency (10-1000 kHz) body waves generated by the release of strain energy through grain rearrangement (Michlmayr et al, 2012). Further studies confirmed these results for several slopes (Rouse et al, 1991;Smith et al, 2014;Dixon et al, 2015Dixon et al, , 2018, where correlations between AE, surface displacement and heavy rainfall were documented. AEs record deep deformation processes before signs of displacement are identifiable at the surface.…”

Acoustic Emission investigation for avalanche formation and release: A case study of dry-slab avalanche event in Great Himalaya

“…The attenuation of AE-waves in snow decreases the signal magnitudes (Faillettaz et al, 2016;Capelli et al, 2016), therefore, to overcome this problem, specialized AE antenna (arrestors) are required for detection of the feeble AE. For design of the AE arrestors, past research work of Kapil et al (2014), Smith and Dixon (2014) and Dixon et al (2018) are cited. The AE arrestors of different designs and dimensions were fabricated and then tested for an optimum design in view of the conditions of a natural avalanche slope.…”

Acoustic Emission Sensing of Pipe–Soil Interaction: Full-Scale Pipelines Subjected to Differential Ground Movements

“…AE system (1) was a device developed for field monitoring of slopes, named Slope ALARMS (e.g. Smith et al 2014;Smith and Dixon 2015;Dixon et al 2015a;Dixon et al 2015b;Smith et al 2017a;Berg et al 2018;Dixon et al 2018), and comprised a bandpass filter to attenuate signals outside of the 20-30 kHz range and amplification of 70 dB to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Focusing AE measurement to within 20-30 kHz removes environmental noise (e.g.…”

“…Koerner et al 1976;Koerner et al 1978;Koerner et al 1981;Koerner et al 1984;Mitchell and Romeril 1984;Tanimoto and Tanaka 1986;Garga and Chichibu 1990;Shiotani and Ohtsu 1999). Recent advances have been made in the interpretation of soil/structure interaction behavior from AE measurements using physical modelling and field experiments for slope instability (Smith et al 2014;Smith and Dixon 2015;Dixon et al 2015a;Dixon et al 2015b;Michlmayr et al 2017;Smith et al 2017a;Berg et al 2018;Dixon et al 2018) and pile loading (Mao et al 2015;Mao et al 2016;Mao et al 2018) applications.…”

“…Research has developed an AE landslide early warning system, named Slope ALARMS, which is able to provide early detection of progressive failure and quantify displacement rates ranging from 0.0001 mm/hour to more than 400 mm/hour, as evidenced by field trials and large-scale laboratory testing (Smith et al 2014;Smith and Dixon 2015;Dixon et al 2015a;Dixon et al 2015b;Smith et al 2017a;Berg et al 2018;Dixon et al 2018). Moreover, Smith & Dixon (2019) demonstrated the benefits of using AE to monitor the behaviour of dense sands in triaxial experiments, and they proposed a framework to interpret the mobilisation of peak shear strength and to quantify rates of shear strain from AE measurements.…”