Development and Introduction of System for Monitoring, Analyzing and Predicting the State of Soils of a Frozen Dam

Abstract

Monitoring and assessing the technical condition of earth dams in the permafrost zone is a complex multicriteria task. Harsh climatic, difficult engineering-geological and hydrogeological conditions, high functional responsibility of hydraulic constructions in the Far North determine special requirements for the location and composition of control and measurement system. For a long period of the year, many locations of the dam are inaccessible, and it is extremely difficult to get to others, because of the snow. Therefore, the monitoring system must constantly collect data from many hard-to-reach nodes and transmit this data over a long distance to the point with special data control and analysis software. The measuring system described in this article has been implemented and it is successfully used to control the temperature regime of the ice-soil core of the dam, water intake and spillway during its operation. The system includes two branches of thermometric points (wells with thermometric cable), connected with communication lines for data transfer between them, software for configuring measurement controllers, and software for collecting, processing and transmitting data to predict the state of the dam. This article describes the process of collecting data from thermometric points, the process of developing software in the LabVIEW environment for processing collected data and describes some elements of the user interface.