stefania.amici@ingv.it

4-6 September 2013

VOLCANIC ENVIRONMENTS MONITORING BY

DRONES: MUD VOLCANO CASE STUDY

S. Amici, a, M. Turci b, F. Giulietti b, S. Giammanco a, M.F

Buongiorno a, A. La Spina a and L. Spampinato a

a Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, 001143 Roma Italy

b Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale (DIN), 47121 Forlì Italy

Mount Etna

Overview

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Aim of the study test the

system including payload

• Background• Test site: geological

setting • System• Experiment description• Discussion• Conclusion

Background

Etna is frequently subject to remote sensing studies, focused on detecting thermal anomalies, measuring volcanic gas emissions and evaluating ground deformations though InSAR and GPS analysis

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http://geology.com/volcanoes/stromboli/

Stromboli flight October 2004

• Fix wingsSaggiani G.M., et al 2004, IGARSS04 , Anchorage, Alaska

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Geological setting:

The most active vents are those located close to the local football stadium Water outlet temperatures are normally between 10 and 20 °C, but occasionally increase to 40-50 °C. Such anomalous temperature values are always accompanied by increases in gas efflux.

In the past many paroxysms occurred in the degassing activity of the Salinelle.

Le Salinelle: mud volcano4-6 September 2013

The emitted fluids are hydrocarbons (mainly CH4) and hypersaline water, variably charged with mud that often pond in pools from centimetres to meters in diameter .

The mud and water mixtures are highly variable, and in some cases mud is the only fluid erupted with gas.

10cm 15cm

System • Multirotor system (hexacopter) • Two battery pack, each one

including six- lipo cell powering a flight autonomy of 15 minutes.

• Max payload’s weight of 1.7 kg.• The flight control system stabilises

the drone for a manual control by the pilot using standard radio control and also allows several flight mode configuration, hold over a fixed point and single waypoint autonomous flight.

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Acquisition SystemThe embedded solution is based on four PC-104 compliant stackable

modules: Power supply, Frame grabber, PC and Wi-Fi module: • Power supply module: it is a DC-DC converter offering up to 75 Watt. It

can power all stacked modules over PC-104 bus using a low weight 3 cells Lithium Poliymer battery (weight of 205 gr)

• Frame grabber module: it is a real time PAL/NTSC Frame Grabber and live video overlay controller for PC/104+ bus.

• PC module: it consists in a low power consumption embedded pc running Windows XP operating system. Using specific driver it is possible to acquire each frame from the video grabber module and store the resulting video in the 4 GB compact Flash who also hosts the operating system.

• Wi-Fi module: By using this module it’s possible to operate the embedded PC in wireless connection. The embedded system is integrated in a compact cubic configuration (size and weight) as showed in figure 5.

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Payload• The 3600AS camera uses a proven

Amorphous Silicon (AS) microbolometer technology.

• The 30 micron pitch detectors make possible a lightweight (67g ).

• long wavelength passive infrared camera core (spectral response 7-14micron).

• Capable of less than 50 milli-kelvin thermal sensitivity and a saturation temperature of 600°C.

• The camera has a frame rate of 25 hertz real time and generates a PAL video output .

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• The experiment at the Salinelle mud volcanoes was conducted on 26 June 2012, in the late afternoon as to avoid the maximum Sun effects (reflection and heat release from the ground.

• The system has been pre-assembled while payload configuration and system connection have been realised in situ.

• A calibrated Forward Looking InfraRed (FLIR) thermal camera was used for cross-comparison with the data acquired during the flight experiment. The FLIR camera was a A310 model consisting of a 320 x 240 microbolometer detector array sensitive to the 8-14 m wave band, with dynamic range of 0 to +350 °C and accuracy of ±2% of reading.

• Two two different areas areas have been investigated

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The campaign

First flight

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TIR data cross comparison

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TC3600 thermal spots (black) are compared with FLIR apparent temperature values: maximum temperature are in red, minimum temperature are showed in blue and mean temperature with standard deviation are in orange. The green star indicated the FLIR temperature in correspondence of the TC 3600 spot point 2

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Second flight

Amici et al. 2013 A.R.S.

Field measurement

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Emissivity measurement

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• Test the real time monitoring and the post processing operations proved that thermal camera data are comparable with in situ measurements

Conclusion

•The experiment proved as UAV can be a relevant support at monitoring operations that in certain circumstances are difficult and dangerous to be performed

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• The system performed very well under extreme environment• Small UAV are suitable for mud volcano measurement

Thank you for your attention!

We love thermal imaging

http://openmap.rm.ingv.it/labtel/index.php/rtsystems-monitoring/uav

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