The Design And Implementation Of Digital Inclinometer System

Slope inclinometry technology commonly used today is derived from a prototype built in 1950s, combined the measuring methods and measuring instruments, is able to monitor the tilt angle and deformation of a bore hole. A slope inclinometer is wildly used in railway transportation, hydroelectric dams, construction, mining, geological surveys and some other infrastructure engineering fields, especially applied to detecting the stability of the natural or artifical side slope, and monitoring the stability of dykes or dams, and some other areas.At first, this paper introduces the principle of slope inclinometry and its mathematical model, describes the composition of a slope inclinometer, and focus on the hardware design and software design of a slope inclinometer system. The system contains two main parts, a underground instrument and a monitoring system above ground, is able to work as a slope inclinometer with or without cable, a slope inclinometer with cable is often limited by the depth of a bore hole, while a slope inclinometer without cable can not transport measured data to the ground as a bore hole is being measured even if the depth of the hole is very shallow. The underground instrument is made up of a SCA100T series tilt angle sensor, which is made by VTI, a PIC16F876A microcontroller produced by Microchip, and a rechargeable battery, it is connected to the monitoring system above ground by a cable of RS485. The monitoring system is designed by Visual C++, and Microsoft Access is used to manage measured data, the data stored in Access database can be accessed and tabulated or figured using the ADO technique.At last, experiments are designed to test the repeatability of the system's measurement and the linearity of the system's output in laboratory, and the results are given.