Freesteel Blog » Underground camping data logger

Underground camping data logger

Thursday, July 14th, 2016 at 7:57 am Written by:

To distract myself on the underground camp of terror I stripped down my hang-glider logging device and took it down with a string of temperature sensors, barometer, humidity sensor and light cell and stuck it in a box in the corner with the string dallas temperature sensors extending out along the clothes line some ways from the tent.

tentdatalogger

The tent was a home made affair designed to be light and sleep four people. The fabric was slightly water resistant. There was immediately a condensation problem with cavers waking up in the morning with the sleeping bags soaking.

As a consequence people began leaving the front door to the tent wide open which meant that it was not a lot warmer inside than out.

analysispic2

Key: The red vertical lines are in increments of 5 hours, horizontal lines are increments of 1 deg C (when applicable). Cyan lines are the temperature measuring devices, some inside and some outside. Cave temperature was around 2.9degrees, while inside the tent it got to 5degrees in the early part of the night.

The four lumps of yellow on the lower line are from the light sensor and represent: (1) first arrival at camp and setting up the logger, (2) return to the camp after an afternoon of caving, (3) waking up in the morning, (4) returning back to the camp for packing up and leaving.

There is a sudden spike up in temperature when I dropped some of my spare clothes onto a sensor that I took off ready for the long climb out.

The upper red trace is the humidity x 0.1 and varies between 95% and 88%. The middle white trace is the temperature logged by the humidity sensor itself. The lower white line below the zero is the barometric reading, which spends its time around 88000millibars corresponding to about 1200m altitude.

Finally the yellow line is the dewpoint temperature, which varies between 2degrees and 4degrees.

Some condensation was briefly encountered when we first got into the tent slightly sweaty (and the yellow and white lines crossed over). For the first half of the night the dewpoint temperature differential was at about 1degree. Then someone woke in the middle of the night and pulled the tent door much wider open which dropped the humidity by 2% and the inside temperature by 0.75degrees, but the differential widened slightly.

I don’t know why the temperature varies so much during the night. Maybe it’s overall constant, but there are slight changes in convection currents that vary this. I should string the sensors all round the inside to see how it cross-varies.

It takes at least an hour for stability to resume when we leave the camp. Humidity rises as the temperature decreases.

Would the story have been different with a more porous tent fabric that could let out the water rather than one designed to be impermeable to liquids? If this was used we may have been able to raise the temperature inside the tent high enough to be clear of the dewpoint value, even though there is not much room below the 100% mark.

There should be a calculation of number of breathing and sweating bodies, the inside temperature and the and rate of exchange of air that provides for an optimal size and location of vent holes for the night. However, it’s difficult to find anywhere in the world that is this cold, humid and miserable for any experiments.

There are constant drafts around the cave which leave their mark in the rock formations. A set of barometers carefully synchronized, both outside and inside the cave, could produce an account of the total volume of the cave and its effective entrance surface area by modeling the flow of air molecules between these different reservoirs. This would tell you what percentage of the cave has been found. Experiments could be done on man-made tunnels whose dynamics are simple and volumes known. Higher frequency induced pressure changes might also be detected given that the bluefly is measuring at 50Hz.

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <strong>