Testing and calibration of smart pebble for river bed sediment transport monitoring

Testing and calibration of smart pebble for river bed sediment transport monitoring

Akeila, Ehad ; Salcic, Zoran ; Kularatna, Nihal ; Melville, Bruce ; Dwivedi, Ambuj

Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10289/3718

Date: 2007

Citation: Akeila, E., Salcic, Z., Kularatna, N., Melville, B. & Dwivedi, A. (2007). Testing and calibration of smart pebble for river bed sediment transport monitoring. In Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Conference on Sensors, IEEE, Atlanta Georgia, USA; 28-31 October, 2007. (pp.1201-1204). Washington, DC, USA: IEEE.

Rights: This is an author’s accepted version of an article published in the Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Conference on Sensors, IEEE, Atlanta Georgia, USA; 28-31 October, 2007. © 2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

Abstract:

The Smart Pebble (smart particle), SP, has been developed for the past two years to monitor sediment transport in riverbeds. The implementation is based on use of small size and low cost acceleration and angular motion sensors. In this stage, the project is focused on calibrating and testing the final version of the SP as well as its packaging in a 4-cm diameter spherical package. The calibration was done in two stages; individual sensor calibration and complete system calibration. The complete SP unit was tested under linear motions generated by a shake table, and 2D rotational motions using two manually controlled servomotors. Offline digital signal conditioning was done in MATLAB. The preliminary results show that the system has relatively large amplitude error due to low sampling frequency. Experiments conducted by sampling a 1-Hz sinusoidal signal at different rates show that to keep the amplitude error of the system under 5% the sampling rate has to be at least 10 times the maximum bandwidth of the signals acquired from sensors.

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