Numerical Prediction of Soil Displacement Based on Imu Sensor Measurement

Abstract

Recently, smart technology using inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors, which combine an accelerometer and gyroscope in six degrees of freedom, in the tracking the motion of robots or smart phones has developed rapidly. However, there have been no applications of this kind of sensor in measuring soil displacement in geotechnical engineering. In this research, IMU sensors were installed into the ground to track the displacement during slope failure progress. First, granular soil was placed in a scaled soil box with a rotated wall to induce failure while it was compacted to a specific unit weight. The large deformation in the experiments was simulated using a smooth particle hydrodynamics method in Abaqus commercial software. In this study, the Mohr–Coulomb model was employed to describe the elasto–plastic behavior of soil. Then, a variation of the soil friction angle was applied in numerical simulations to match the experiment results. A reasonable friction angle was determined from 20º to 21º based on the back analysis and IMU sensor data.