Simultaneous determination of gravitational acceleration and ground vibrations by free fall experiments

Abstract

We investigated how well we can simultaneously determine the gravitational acceleration and ground vibrations with many free falls at short intervals by using synthetic data which contain quadratic functions, sinusoids and white noise in order to improve the accuracy of absolute gravimetry and to realize the measurements without a seismometer. As a result of simulations, lower white noise, longer dropping time and longer duration of a series of free falls improve the accuracy in determination of g. The sampling internvals and the dropping intervals, on the other hand, hardly affect the accuracy so long as they are shorter than Nyquist intervals. Both the gravitational acceleration and the waveform of the long period vibrations can be well determined with a series of free falls of about only 2 cm dropping distance without deterioration in the accuracy with this procedure.