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History of the BUET Low-Cost Accelerometer (BLCA)

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Bangladesh is highly vulnerable to geohazards such as earthquakes and landslides. Despite this, the country lacks an effective, large-scale monitoring and early warning system. One of the major barriers has been the high procurement and maintenance cost of commercial seismic and geotechnical instruments. In many cases, government agencies procure expensive devices from abroad, but once they malfunction, repairing them becomes equally costly. Due to limited local expertise and the closed-source nature of most commercial instruments, these systems often become unusable after a few years.

 

A picture of two BLCAs in operation

 

To address this gap, our team initiated the development of locally manufacturable, low-cost monitoring instruments capable of recording ground motion and supporting early warning applications. The aim was not only to reduce dependency on expensive, imported systems but also to build long-term domestic expertise in instrumentation and geohazard monitoring.

Under the project “Development of Low-Cost Methods for Monitoring and Early Warning for Geohazards”, funded by the Research and Innovation Centre for Science and Engineering (RISE), BUET, the team successfully designed and programmed a suite of low-cost devices, including accelerometers (BLCA), tiltmeters, and inclinometers. Initial evaluations, such as shake table tests - demonstrated promising calibration accuracy of the BLCA devices. While further refinement is ongoing, these early results show strong potential for building a reliable nationwide monitoring network.

Our team remains committed and focused on enhancing device performance, reducing limitations, and developing a robust early warning system for the people of Bangladesh and the global community - particularly for regions where high procurement costs hinder the adoption of geohazard monitoring technologies.

Current Features of the BUET Low-Cost Accelerometer (BLCA):

  1. Continuous recording of ground acceleration

  2. Local data storage at 100 samples per second

  3. Periodic upload of measurements to cloud-based servers

  4. Automated alerts via Telegram when threshold acceleration levels are exceeded

  5. Compatibility with civil engineering applications such as structural health monitoring