The first stage of the project had the following objectives:

1) study on areas with high risk of landslides in Moldavian Plateau and analyze of the opportunities of their monitoring, study of the influence and control factors,

2) evaluation of the possibilities for using the nanostructured materials for the development of sensing elements for building sensors for landslides monitoring,

3) design, construction and testing the sensitive elements with improved performances using new materials in the form of micro and tapes, for transducers dedicated for landslide risk evaluation.

All 3 objectives were successfully achieved during this stage. The study has been oriented on the geomorphological characterization of the Moldavian Plateau, showing the main types of landslides that currently exist in this geographical area of Romania , and the areas with high risk of landslide. This study was necessary to identify the areas where the landslide monitoring system developed within the project will be installed.

With respect to the second objective, there were produced four types of amorphous magnetic wires, two conventional ones and two glass-coated, which were characterized in terms of magnetic properties, of magnetoimpedance and stressimpedance effects point of view. There are described the procedures for obtaining these kind of wires and the parameters affecting their quality. After analyzing their experimental characteristics, it was concluded that the conventional amorphous wires CoFeSiB composition are the most suitable for the construction of strain gauges.

Based on this wires, there were designed, constructed and tested the strain gauge type sensors. We found from these tests that the devices show significantly higher performances than those currently available on the market in terms of sensitivity, but they have a relatively high dispersion of the non-uniformity resulting from the manufacturing process. The strain gauge, which is the main piece of the landslide transducer, has been constructed. It consists from a flexible polypropylene bar, vertically mounted into the ground, on which there are mounted stages of 4 strain gauges connected in Wheatstone bridges. They measure the bar deformations due to the sliding.

In this stage, it was designed and built the circuit for primary processing of signals acquired from strain gauge bridges.

The dissemination of the results has been achieved through 9 papers presented at international symposia, a paper submitted to journals Thomson Reuters Sensors & Actuators A: Physical and paper accepted for publication in Journal of Applied Physics.