Automatic Data Acquisition Station For Hydro-power Dams With Earthquake Trigger Action

The supervision of dam behavior is a remote process of data acquisition and analysis. This can be achieved only with an automatic acquisition station. This paper presents a station that is capable of timely detecting with high precision dam defaults. In normal operation regime, the station reads the specific parameters of dam behavior, like: water level, water and atmospheric temperature, displacements of the dam´s blocks, opening cracks, inflow, hydrostatic pressures, basement dam pressure, basement rocks displacements, concrete temperatures, boom stress, a.s.o. Different to the other station, already implemented, the new station has the possibility of being connected to the seismic station or to an accelerograph, so the measurements of the dam´s parameters can be taken in case of an earthquake. In this case, the station will execute a special acquisition program pre-scheduled that measures the dam´s special parameters (water level, water and atmospheric temperature, displacements of the dam´s blocks, opening cracks, inflow) with a high acquisition rate. The novelty of the technical station´s features consists in the using of the automation field equipment, like, programmable logic controllers, as a central unit. The other type of acquisition station is based on a specialized central unit composed of microcontrollers. By using this kind of equipment the fiability of the monitoring system of dam behavior increases. In a natural distress case, like earthquakes, the main objectives affected are communication and power supply networks. The advantage of this new automatic station consists in its great operational autonomy during a power supply failure as it stores the measurements data in its memory bank without the link to its hierarchical level connection. So, in case of distress, the station operates like a Lt black box Gt for the dam