Modern mechanical accelerometers are the result of more than a century of research and development aimed at optimizing the mechanical architectures of classical oscillators (simple pendulum, inverted pendulum, and spring–mass oscillator) as well as careful and effective applications of technology improvements and the introduction of innovative techniques of control and signal readout.
A further strong impulse to the development of mechanical accelerometers came from interferometric detectors of gravitational waves, which require accelerometers able to satisfy very stringent specifications on sensitivity, bandwidth, resonance frequency, directivity, compactness, and weight, for applications both in air and in ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) and cryogenics.
Among the different mechanical architectures present in literature, the Watt's linkage is one of the most promising ones for the implementation of a new class of mechanical accelerometers (horizontal, vertical, and angular).
In this article, a simplified analytical model for a global description of the mechanical behavior and of the sensitivity limits of Watt's linkage‐based mechanical accelerometers is presented and discussed, with respect to methods and techniques for their optimization. State‐of‐the‐art architectures and implementations are also presented, together with selected results of laboratory tests and scientific applications, which show the impressive performances and not yet explored potentialities of this class of mechanical accelerometers.