Laboratory development of TDR automatic distributed settlement sensing for land subsidence monitoring

Recognizing land subsidence to reduce the risk is critical in complex alluvial-basin aquifers and the subsidence profiling requires multi-leveling techniques. However, the manual magnetic ring sampling is limited with low temporal resolution. This study adopted Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) for automatic and high-accuracy instrumentation with designs of subsidence sensor and data reductions. A physical model was included to examine measurement accuracy and standard deviation due to the groundwater variation. The water fluctuates in the unconfined aquifer scenario affected the measurement accuracy to −1.52 cm/m by the Maximum point method. Additionally, the Maximum point accuracy is 0.84 mm/m with a stable water level as the confined aquifer case, proofing the measurement feasibility but limited measurement range due to signal attenuation. Thus, a novel TDR multi-sections schema was provided to solve the signal attenuation, resulting in the measurement range extending to 150 m with a standard deviation ≤ 1 mm.