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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Geohazards and Georisks
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feart.2024.1494067
This article is part of the Research Topic Monitoring, Early Warning and Mitigation of Natural and Engineered Slopes – Volume IV View all 26 articles

A new IoT low-cost bi-directional wire extensometer for landslide monitoring

Provisionally accepted
Daniele Cifaldi Daniele Cifaldi Davide Mazza Davide Mazza *Francesco Maria Guadagno Francesco Maria Guadagno Paola Revellino Paola Revellino
  • Department of Sciences and Technologies, University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The monitoring of slopes' dynamics is essential to ensure the safety of infrastructures exposed to landslide risk and to develop mitigation strategies. However, it is not always possible to perform proper and slope-distributed monitoring due to the high cost of professional instruments. In this context, we developed a low-cost Arduino©-based wire extensometer for landslide monitoring. This instrument is capable of measuring the bi-directional distance between two fixed points, which is useful in landslide areas to observe linear displacements over time. Traditional wire extensometers are equipped with potentiometers, which allow measuring only finite displacements. Instead, our lowcost extensometer exploits a capacitive rotary encoder, which is able to measure infinite displacements. In addition, the new instrument can measure both wire lengthening and shortening, thanks to a spring-loaded winding system. Furthermore, the instrument's settings can be modified to reach a millimetric resolution. The device -developed on an Internet of Things (IoT) project -is equipped with an online data transmission system and with a data-log system for local data storage.Laboratory and field tests were carried out with the aim of evaluating the instrument's accuracy and reliability. Preliminary results demonstrate the great potential of this low-cost sensor for displacement measuring in the field of landslide monitoring.

    Keywords: landslide monitoring1, capacitive rotary encoder2, wire extensometer3, low-cost sensors4, Arduino©5, Internet of Things (IoT)6

    Received: 10 Sep 2024; Accepted: 16 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Cifaldi, Mazza, Guadagno and Revellino. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Davide Mazza, Department of Sciences and Technologies, University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.