Author(s)

J. MAJROUHI SARDROUD, S. HOSSEYNI, E.N. BROMHEAD & M. RIAZI

Abstract

Every landslide catastrophe causes a significant loss to human lives and their assets. These losses have increased as human development has expanded into unstable hill slopes. Thus, monitoring of landslides has received great attention over the past years. Water content and pore-water pressure in the slope areas strongly affect the instability of slops. Therefore, groundwater level is an essential element of the landslide investigation and monitoring. On the other hand, modeling of groundwater is difficult due to the complex internal geology in most landslides prone areas. This research investigates an innovative technique, based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology combined with ultrasonic sensors for accurate and timely identification and monitoring of groundwater level in slopes and landslide susceptible areas. The integrated monitoring and early warning system is continuous and traceable, which is able to monitor groundwater in landslide susceptible areas on a real-time basis and to reliably deliver data to a data management center. The transmission of data to the central database can be carried out with the help of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), and the collected data can be used for slope stability analysis in order to provide real time susceptibility maps. The autonomous (24/7) operation function and effective data transmission of the proposed system can be considered an essential tool for early warning and verification of landslide activity by allowing the user to be warned automatically at the onset of landslide occurrence.

Keywords

Automated landslide monitoring, GPRS, groundwater level, RFID, ultrasonic