The institute offers teamed up with California Institute of Technology (CIT), Pasadena, UNITED STATES, to develop a system having dense network of low-cost motion sensors effective at sensing earthquake's early seismic activity.
"The goal of our project is to set up place a network of small devices called accelerometers near an energetic fault line which can pick up earth vibrations. They may be standalone devices transmitting data to a central server, inch Prof Girish Singhal, project incharge at IIT-GN told PTI.
"A mesh of very low-cost sensors in that area shall have the ability to pick up velocity of shock waves, issuing slight early alerts of the earthquake, " Singhal claimed.
The project is expected to become of immense help to first responders during a calamity.
Based on estimate of experts, an earthquake in Bhuj will take couple of minutes to reach Ahmedabad and an early warning system in position could help in issuing alerts to shut down large machines here, which are potential major source of secondary losses in case of any seismic activity.
Singhal, along with two final 12 months BTech students, is working on this project at IIT-GN.
"One from the students, Prathmesh Juvatkar, visited CIT as part of this project on creating a community seismic network. He has brought four sensors together with him for this pilot project, " Singhal said.
Source : Business-Standard