[Ian, JC]
I want to take measurements of seismic noise at different places on Caltech's campus and in different buildings. I will try to use the accelerometer in my phone for this but first I must calibrate it (Against the 40m accelerometers).
I placed my iPhone 11 pro next to the seismometers at the 40m MC as seen in Attachment 1.
The calibration from the instrument was done using cts/rthz * 1V/16384cts * 1/ampgain * g/10V * 10m/s^2/g. The ampgain for all was 100.
Next, I took 100 seconds of data on both the iPhone and the three orthogonal Wilcoxon accelerometers.
The ASD for both of the total acceleration is shown in Attachment 2
The ASD for the individual directions acceleration is shown in Attachment 3
The coherence between the individual directions acceleration and the 40m's individual directions is shown in Attachment 4. For this calculation, the 40m data were downsampled to roughly match the phone's sample rate. This coherence is not very good. It should be higher. Because the phone and 40m sensors were picking up the same data as the phone. Because of this I also looked at the coherence between the individual 40m sensors.
In Attachment 5 I look at the coherence between the individual 40m sensors. This should give me a good idea of whether this is some other issue giving me mow coherence. This plot shows that the coherence between the individual 40m sensors is much better than between the phone and the 40m sensors.
Now I wanted to see what kind of data the iPhone could get from real-world tests. I placed it in a number of locations described below and plotted their ASDs in Attachment 6. The locations are thus:
| Identifier |
Location |
Notes |
| QIL |
QIL Lab in the Sub-basement of west bridge |
In sub-basement not much activity when taking measurements. |
| WBSH |
West bridge sub-basement hallway |
on floor in hallway no activity around |
| WB1H |
West Bridge 1st floor Hall |
placed on the floor near pillar near stairs to LIGO offices on the ground floor of west bridge |
| 40m desk |
on my desk at the 40m |
placed on the desk while people were walking around and I had my feet on the desk. should be noisy |
Notice how at the low end the amplitudes follow the relative amplitudes I would expect. QIL and WBSH are the lowest then WB1H is noisier and 40m desk is the noisiest. However, this is only true up until about 0.5 Hz then they all overlap. Since I would expect the 40m desk should be much noisier at all frequencies I suspect that the phone accelerometer is not suitable for measurements higher than 0.5 Hz.
Possible Problems:
One possible problem with my measurement is that my phone was in a leather case. this may have damped out higher frequencies. Also, my phone was not weighed down or bolted to the floor. this stronger connection would make it better at detecting higher frequencies. I could repeat the experiment with no case and a weight on top of my phone.
What's next:
Since I don't think the phone can give me accurate data above 0.5Hz for quiet environments. It may not be suitable for this task. It would seem that the right instrument is the Wilcoxon 731A but it requires an amplifier that I can't track down.
I included all the data and code in the zip file in attachment 7
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