Historical Perspective of Accelerometer Technologies

A concept of computerized accelerometers

“…We set the two amplitude parameters X 1 and X 2 to 500µm and 40µm for the experiment with a constant damping coefficient, and 50µm and 10µm for the experiment with a time-dependent damping coefficient, respectively. Although the combined errors of displacement measurements such as mechanical and electronic noises, thermal effect and nonlinearity can be in the range of 1 to 3 percent of full scale [35,38,42,50], high grade sensors can be more accurate [43,44]. We simulate two sets of errors for displacement measurements for each of the two experiments, one with a standard deviation of 1 percent of the maximum displacement and the other with a standard deviation of 0.1 percent of the maximum displacement.…”

“…The damping constant is given by b = 2ξω 0 m and ξ is the damping coefficient. The displacement x(t) of accelerometers can be indirectly derived by using a certain physical sensing device to measure the corresponding physical effect such as piezoresistance, capacitance, piezoelectricity, strain gauge, electron tunnelling, resonance, thermal convection and optics [4, 15,16,35,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. Huge technological advance of hardware for accelerometers has been made over more than one century, in particular, thanks to the finding of piezoresistive effect in silicon by Smith [41] and the invention of microelectromechanical system (MEMS) accelerometers by Roylance and Angell [42] (see also [15,16,35,39,40]).…”

Fabrication and characterization of a piezoelectric accelerometer

“…Most micromachined silicon accelerometers are based on either piezoresistive or capacitive read-out, see e.g. the reviews by Licht and Scheeper [1] or Yazdi et al [2]. Usually these accelerometers are meant for large volume markets and do not exhibit very high precision.…”