Monitoring of the seismic activity using high sensitivity MEMS accelerometer

Abstract

MEMS sensors are widely used type of sensors that can be found in many modern gadgets. Affordable price and small dimensions in combination with high sensitivity and precision made them interesting candidates for the wide range applications in various fields. In case of seismology, application of MEMS accelerometer is still in the shadow of the classical accelerometers with the inertial element, although the characteristics of the today MEMS accelerometers can easily match the classical ones. In this paper group of authors decided to test characteristics of the high sensitivity accelerometer and to determine if it is suitable for the applications in seismology. The requirements that sensor had to meet are high sensitivity and noise level below the threshold of human detectable vibrations which is around four degrees of the Mercalli scale or the ground acceleration between 0.015g and 0.04g.