Thanks to this detection circuit, the eggs can remain in service for many months without depleting their energy resources. In the future, the eggs will be engineered to respond to a range of different volcanic stimuli. The eggs are placed on the slope of the volcano and they are designed to hatch when the sensor-driven module detects vibrations caused by volcanic tremors. They allow the eggs to remain dormant for prolonged periods of time, preserving power, until volcanic activity is detected when the dragon egg "hatches" into a full-featured remote monitoring station with a wireless transmitter. Among these, the self-energising event detectors, known as "sensor-driven" detectors, are a vital part of this new device. These sensor pods are the result of an intense cross-faculty collaboration and incorporate remarkable new technologies invented and developed at the University of Bristol. They must, be able to operate in the extreme conditions of a volcano, be light enough to be carried by a drone, and be ultra-efficient in power consumption since maintenance is not an option at the summit of an active volcano! A significant challenge is optimising the design to meet many different criteria. They are being equipped with a range of state-of-the-art sensors for temperature, humidity, vibrations, and numerous toxic gases. The "dragon eggs" currently being developed are autonomous and intelligent sensor pods designed to monitor volcanic activity. The researchers envisage numerous applications for the technology they are developing, including remote monitoring of other natural phenomenon such as glaciers and geological faults, and man-made hazards, such as nuclear waste storage sites. To tackle this problem researchers from across the Faculties of Science and Engineering have developed highly specialised sensor pods, called "dragon eggs", that can be positioned in dangerous locations using a drone and provide valuable real-time data of volcanic activity that can be used to inform volcanic hazard assessments. For some volcanoes it is simply too dangerous for a human approach. Such extreme, hazardous and unpredictable environments present a very difficult challenge to reliably record volcanic behaviour for analytical models.
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