Best Practices on Identifying Monitoring Points for a Large Concrete Silo

A silver paint pen directly on the concrete and a reflectorless TS?

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I would think that a scanner would be a better tool, scan the whole silo 360?ø each time and compare the point clouds.?ÿ

I suppose you need to monitor for vertical movement, for which you would want points at a convenient height above ground spread around the circumference.?ÿ Also for tilting, points near the top would be most sensitive.?ÿ Do you need to check for deformation as well (possibly not if you can consider it monolithic)

Depends on what kind of loads you are expecting the silo to experience. If it is the weight of the silage that is of concern the pressures will be greatest near the bottom.?ÿ If it is wind loading the movement is apt to be greatest at the top. If undermining of the foundation is expected you might set benchmarks in the foundation and monitor their elevation by levelling.

All monitoring I have done was measured reflectorless to target stickers, pencil marks, paint marks, etc. Any structure will "breathe" normally more than the error in a reflectorless shot. There will have to be 3, 4, 5 hundreths of motion before it even becomes something to look at. Easily detectible by reflectorless.?ÿ ?ÿ?ÿ

I would scan it, create virtual monitoring points from the processed scan, and then stake out the calculated points and shoot them reflectorless.?ÿ It's safer, you won't need to worry about losing physical monitoring points, and it reduces human error from sighting targets.?ÿ I haven't figured out a way to make a scanning only monitoring job efficient.?ÿ Yes it's faster in the field, but it becomes quite a process in the office.?ÿ If anyone here regularly compares scans for monitoring, I'd be very interested in hearing about the software and how you use it.

You used the term silo, but the contents could be anything.?ÿ What is your goal specifically??ÿ Is the site subject to subsidence or compression of the support media (soil, rock, concrete foundation).?ÿ Is the silo possibly beginning to tilt??ÿ There should be minimal crushing of the vertical walls due to vertical loading.?ÿ Bulging due to horizontal loads could be a concern if the silo was constructed poorly.