Performance Evaluation of Low-Cost Seismic Sensors for Dense Earthquake Early Warning: 2018–2019 Field Testing in Southwest China

Abstract

Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) was proved to be a potential means of disaster reduction. Unfortunately, the performance of the EEW system is largely determined by the density of EEW network. How to reduce the cost of sensors has become an urgent problem for building a dense EEW. A low-cost seismic sensor integrated with a Class C MEMS accelerometer was proposed in this paper. Based on minimal structure design, the sensor’s reliability was enhanced, while the costs were cut down as well. To fully reveal the performance, ten of the seismic sensors were installed and tested in Sichuan Province, southwest of China from May 2018 to February 2019. The seismic records obtained by the MNSMSs were compared with those by the traditional strong motion seismographs. The records obtained by the MNSMSs have good consistency with the data obtained by the Etnas. The MNSMSs can obtain clear seismic phases that are enough to trigger earthquake detections for EEW. By noise analysis, different channels of the same sensor and different sensors have good consistency. The tested dynamic range (over 87 dB) and useful resolution (over 14.5 bits) are completely in conformity with the designed parameters. Through real field testing, small earthquakes (M 3.1–3.6) can be detected by all three components E-W, N-S, and U-D within 50 km. In all, the low-cost seismic sensor proposed as a high-performance Class C MEMS sensor can meet the needs of dense EEW in terms of noise, dynamic range, useful resolution, reliability, and detecting capabilities.

Modul Deteksi dan Perekaman Data Gempa berbasis Database Earthquake Intensity (DEI)

“…Masing masing range mempunyai alamatnya masing-masing, hal ini dikarenakan sensor ini menggunakan I2C sebagai antar mukanya (Firman, 2016). Modul deteksi gempa yang dirancang berupaya meminimalkan biaya sensor yang menjadi masalah penting dalam membangun sistem peringatan dini gempa (Fu, 2019).…”

Verifying Deep Reductions in the Nuclear Arsenals: Development and Demonstration of a Motion-Detection Subsystem for a “Buddy Tag” Using Non-Export Controlled Accelerometers

“…In parallel, stability of bias and scale factor improved [15], [16]. There are numerous applications for MEMS accelerometers today: they include airbag deployment systems used in the automotive industry, modern cell phones and cameras [17], and many scientific applications, including earthquake detection [18]. MEMS devices have reached high-end tactical-grade for military applications [19].…”

“…The buddy-tag prototype developed as part of this project is based on the ADXL355 accelerometer, which is a threeaxis, "ultralow noise and ultrastable offset" MEMS device with micromachined, fully differential sensing elements [27]. The ADXL355 is one of the lowest-noise commercially available sensors with a noise density of 25 µg/ √ H z, but still classified as Class C for seismic applications [18], [28]. The datasheet further specifies an offset repeatability of at most ±3.5 mg, much higher than required for tactical-grade accelerometers [19].…”

A Review of the Capacitive MEMS for Seismology

“…Starting from the 2010s, a multitude of similar projects have been implemented all around the world. Some of them encompass the design, prototyping, and production of devoted MEMS sensors [47,48,49], some focusing on the realization of a complete MEMS-based seismic station exploiting commercial products [50,51,52,53,54,55,56], and some others realize real networks with MEMS-based stations [21,57,58,59,60,61]. Some other projects just exploit the mobile phones themselves by means of specific apps, focusing on the huge diffusion of those devices [31,62,63].…”