Remote long-term monitoring of critical infrastructure with key safety movement band tolerance in landslide vulnerable areas

ended

Monitoring slope movements is becoming a crucial task in today’s societies. Natural landslides cause damages of €18 billion/year at a global scale, and around 66M people—1% of the world’s population—currently live in high-risk areas. Furthermore, this number is increasing steadily due to climate change. On the other hand, human activities such as large geotechnical constructions, a growing network of linear infrastructures and mining increase the danger of soil movement. The need for cost-effective and reliable slope monitoring technology is increasing. However, currently available slope monitoring technologies are basically reduced to manual inclinometer probes, which require the deployment of operators and equipment to take measures directly in the slope. This hampers measurements at short intervals or in remote or unstable areas. Automatic inclinometers are capable of transmitting data in real time, however they are very costly and require complex technical installations. We present ALARTE: an automatic inclinometer probe that can transmit data in real, is cost-effective and easily installed; a game-changing technology that will disrupt the market of geotechnical monitoring by closing the gap between manual and automatic monitoring options. The consortium is composed by companies covering the whole supply chain: Tecnalia (Spain), IPR and R&D, Mikrosay (Turkey) production, FEHRL (Belgium) dissemination, Sixense (France) commercialization and Ferrovial (Spain) validation. We will target monitoring service companies, geotechnical consultants, critical infrastructure operators, and the Public administration putting the focus on growing infrastructure markets: linear, energy, mining and urban engineering. We plan sale at least 3,078 ALARTE units and sign 574 monitoring service contracts. Thanks to this strategy, the project will generate €31.35 M in revenues by the fifth year of commercialization (€11.6 M cumulative profit), ROI 4.6 against total investment of €2.51 M