Tunable mechanical monolithic sensors for real-time broadband distributed monitoring of large civil and industrial infrastructures

In the last decades the interest in the development of sensors for low-frequency long-term monitoring systems aimed to assess the structural health status of large buildings and infrastructures like dams, bridges, sky-scrapes, oil platforms, etc., has largely increased. Among the different architecture of candidate sensors for this task, the UNISA Folded Pendulum class of sensors is one of the most promising ones for the implementation of mechanical accelerometers (horizontal, vertical and angular). In this paper, we present monolithic implementations of inertial mechanical seismometers/accelerometers based on the UNISA Folded Pendulum mechanical configuration, optimized for low frequency characterization of large structures.