Performance Evaluation of Low-Cost Seismic Sensors for Dense Earthquake Early Warning: 2018–2019 Field Testing in Southwest China

Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) was proved to be a potential means of disaster reduction. Unfortunately, the performance of the EEW system is largely determined by the density of EEW network. How to reduce the cost of sensors has become an urgent problem for building a dense EEW. A low-cost seismic sensor integrated with a Class C MEMS accelerometer was proposed in this paper. Based on minimal structure design, the sensor’s reliability was enhanced, while the costs were cut down as well. To fully reveal the performance, ten of the seismic sensors were installed and tested in Sichuan Province, southwest of China from May 2018 to February 2019. The seismic records obtained by the MNSMSs were compared with those by the traditional strong motion seismographs. The records obtained by the MNSMSs have good consistency with the data obtained by the Etnas. The MNSMSs can obtain clear seismic phases that are enough to trigger earthquake detections for EEW. By noise analysis, different channels of the same sensor and different sensors have good consistency. The tested dynamic range (over 87 dB) and useful resolution (over 14.5 bits) are completely in conformity with the designed parameters. Through real field testing, small earthquakes (M 3.1–3.6) can be detected by all three components E-W, N-S, and U-D within 50 km. In all, the low-cost seismic sensor proposed as a high-performance Class C MEMS sensor can meet the needs of dense EEW in terms of noise, dynamic range, useful resolution, reliability, and detecting capabilities.