Shock and vibration measurements applications

• Development, testing and operational monitoring of structures and machines
  • Machine health monitoring
  • Fault diagnosis
  • Structural diagnosis
• Human vibration measurements
• Crash detection for airbag deployment in cars
• Provision of feedback signals to steady the image in a video recorder against hand-held vibration
• ...

For the sensing of the vibratory motion are almost exclusively used accelerometers

• High accuracy
• Wide-band frequency and amplitude response
• Small size
• Light weight
• Long life and ease of installation

Acceleration units

• Standard SI unit for acceleration: ms-2
• Multiples of the gravitational acceleration, g = 9.98 ms-2

Range of acceleration values in different applications

• From 10-6 g to 2.105 g
• Airbag systems sensitivities
  • for front-impact 20 to 100 g
  • for side-impact 100 to 250 g

Categories of acceleration measurement

• Acceleration measurement of solid bodies (airplanes, missiles, cars, ?) with a low frequency variations (0 to few tens of Hz)
• Low frequency vibration measurement (up to few hundreds of Hz)
• High frequency vibration measurement (up to few tens of kHz)
• Shocks measurements (high level of acceleration in the frequency band up to 100 kHz)