^Title Tension Sensors For The British Antarctic Survey

At the Halley Research Station, the extreme environment poses great technical problems to construction engineers.  Formerly, blizzards and snow drifts have eventually buried everything and the site has gone through a number of re-positioning exercises since 1957. The tension in the bracing wires needed to be constantly monitored to keep within safety limits and to ensure that the tension is spread evenly to avoid distortion.

Accordingly, British Antarctic Survey have installed 20 of Mantracourt’s DSC digital strain cards at its Halley Research Station. The DSC is the miniature PCB card version of the DCell (the tiny 20mm in-cell module).

The DSC cards monitor tension in the bracing wires of the station. The station is built on steel legs buried deep in the ice. To keep the structure square and true, each of the legs braces outwards with a stainless steel wire. With this in mind, it is vitally important that wire tension limits are not exceeded as the temperature falls.

For this reason each of the 20 wires secures itself using a strain shackle, connecting to a DSC card.  Due to the low temperatures the card is housed in an environmental enclosure. The 20 DSC cards bring their outputs to a PC via a multi drop RS485 connection. Specifically designed software manages this, and monitors all 20 outputs for strain and temperature. The facilities available offer calibration, logging, and printing out the tension data which someone can then monitor. By using satellite and GPS communications, personnel can remotely access this data in most areas of the World.