Development and evaluation of a calibration procedure for a 2D accelerometer as a tilt and vibration sensor

Abstract

Measuring tilt and vibration are two of the major applications of accelerometers. An experimental method to calibrate a commercially available 2D accelerometer (ADXL202JQC) as a tilt and a vibration measuring device is discus sed in this publication. Calibration of tilt measurements (measuring acceleration due to th e gravity - the static case) was done by rotating the accelerometer in a vertical plane. Also the effect of minor inclinations of the plane rotation of this experiment was investigated and observed to be minute. Based on the calibration for the static case, the accelerometer was tested in a dynamic case. A known type of motion; the motion of a tip of a cantilever, was us ed to test the calibration of the accelerometer for the dynamic case. Motion of the tip of a cant ilever was considered as a damping oscillation thus the variation of acceleration of the tip of the cantilever was considered a decaying sinusoidal. The measurements obtained through accelerometer agreed to this proposed model with R 2 values in the range of 0.93 to 0.98. The frequency of osc illation of the cantilever was varied by changing the length of the cantilever. The periods of oscillation obtained by the accelerometer agreed with the same values obtained from a stroboscope to maximum percentage deviation of approximately 3%.