Design and initial testing of instrumented particles for rock-fall dynamics monitoring

The occurrence of rock-falls can be extremely detrimental to built infrastructure including buildings, road and rail networks, interrupting human services and activities, while sometimes injuries and fatalities may be added to their socio-economical cost. With the rapid development of urbanised cities increasing the exposure of built infrastructure, as well as climate change induced extreme weather triggering rock-falls, the frequency and magnitude or rock-fall hazards is only expected to continue to intensify. Rock-falls can exhibit complex dynamics and any numerical modelling developed to study them, relies heavily on theoretical models and empirical knowledge. This study aims to investigate rock-fall dynamics using newly designed instrumented particles [1] for scaled physical models under well-controlled laboratory experiments. Specifically, the design and initial testing of small diameter (3cm) instrumented particles developed for studying rock-falls for a range of dry flume slopes and bed surface roughness is presented herein. The design aspects of the experimental setup (dry flume), instrumented particle (including the sensor and its casing), recorded data (including acceleration and angular velocity) are discussed, for a range of initial experiments.

Keywords: rock-fall; instrumented rock; particle dynamics; inter-particle collisions

References [1] K. Al-Obaidi, Y. Xu, M. Valyrakis (2020). The Design and Calibration of Instrumented Particles for Assessing Water Infrastructure Hazards, J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2020, 9(3), https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan814323