Data acquisition system for a seismic station

Abstract

Any type of detailed research or scientific study of huge environments. such as our planet Earth would require sensitive and accurate instruments. More often then not, the most significant events occur unexpectedly and to capture such occurrences a dedicated system is required to be in continuous operation with the minimum human supervision. In this project, an automated data collection system has been designed, constructed and put to work. The system takes analogue voltage readings from a three component ground motion. seismometers, converts them to a digital form and saves the result on disk. The system is designed around three analogue-to-digital converters with a 24-bit resolution and a maximum sampling rate of 100Hz. The samples are time-stamped with a signal that is attained from a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. A dedicated processor handles the raw data collection, and transfers the data to a PC for storage. Software written particularly for this purpose provides a user interface as well as a triggering facility so that only significant events are stored, thus saving disk space. The data on the PC can then be accessed using standard software and networking facilities.