Compensation techniques for geophone response used as vibration sensor in seismic applications

Abstract

With prolific usage of vibration analysis to extract information about different structures (buildings and bridges etc.), vibration sensors have become an important device in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). In this paper, we target geophone which is a commonly used sensor in SHM. Each geophone is unique with regard to application, sensitivity, and electrical characteristics. For the geophone that has been used in this study, we focused on the low frequency response to develop an optimum conditioning circuit for the sensor. Geophone response compensator is essential for conditioning vibration signals at very low frequencies. In this article, we have presented two different techniques to reconstruct the low frequency response characteristics of the geophone. Several analog electronic circuits to establish the feasibility of the suggested techniques for vibration signal conditioning by the geophone on hand are presented in this article.