The community seismic network and quake-catcher network: enabling structural health monitoring through instrumentation by community participants

A new type of seismic network is in development that takes advantage of community volunteers to install low-cost accelerometers houses and buildings. The Community Seismic Network and Quake-Catcher Network are examples of, in which observational-based structural monitoring is carried out using records from one to tens of stations in a single. We have deployed about one hundred accelerometers in a number of buildings ranging between five and 23 in the Los Angeles region. In addition to a USB-connected device which connects to the host’s computer, we developed a stand-alone sensor-plug-computer device that directly connects to the internet via Ethernet or wifi. In case of the Community Seismic Network, the sensors report both continuous data and anomalies in local acceleration a cloud computing service consisting of data centers geographically distributed across the continent. Visualization of the instrumented buildings’ dynamic linear response have been constructed using Google SketchUp and an plug-in to matlab with recorded shaking data. When data are available from only one to a very limited number accelerometers in high rises, the buildings are represented as simple shear beam or prismatic Timoshenko beam models soil-structure interaction. Small-magnitude earthquake records are used to identify the first set of horizontal vibrational. These frequencies are then used to compute the response on every floor of the building, constrained the observed data. These tools are resulting in networking standards that will enable data sharing among entire, facility managers, and emergency response groups.