Vibration monitoring under own management

The historic main railway station located in the city of Groningen was first opened in 1866. Currently, a huge construction project is taking place to update the station area to fit the needs of our modern age. We at NS Stations find it extremely important that the historical building suffers no damage, such as subsidence, due to the effects of the vibrations during the construction work.

"The modifications are pretty radical. Namely, there will be a new passenger tunnel from the station square at the front of the station building to the platforms at the rear of the building. There will also be a bicycle tunnel underneath the building. Thanks to Omnidots, we will be alerted immediately if there is too much vibration in the foundations of the station building. We hope this does not happen, but if it does, we will receive a text message and immediately halt the construction work to check what is going wrong. So the alerts and the live measurement are very important for us.

In total, we installed 10 SWARMs onto the foundation beams in the basement of the building. The construction work has yet to start, so we are first doing a baseline measurement. This is to account for the continuous vibrations received from trains arriving and departing from the station. Later, when the construction begins, we can then filter out these standard vibrations.

We requested several quotes for vibration measurement equipment but chose to work with Omnidots. This is because, with Omnidots, we do not have to rent expensive equipment but immediately get the vibration meters as our property. We found the installation very easy to set up, the online platform very accessible, and Omnidots' solution cost-effective. We first configured all of the settings on Honeycomb and then easily attached the SWARMs in the basement.

We do the vibration monitoring under our own management and have hired an expert firm to help us analyze the measurement results. The building contractor also carries out vibration measurements, but we want to be sure that we will be alerted immediately if our premises vibrate too much. This gives us a good sense of security, which is very important for this old historical and monumental building.

For us, this project with Omnidots is done as a trial. We are remodeling many more stations and may also want to use Omnidots' sensors for vibration measurement in the future."