High performance MEMS accelerometers for concrete SHM applications and comparison with COTS accelerometers

Abstract

Accelerometers used for civil and huge mechanical structural health monitoring intend to measure the shift in the natural frequency of the monitored structures (<100Hz) and such sensors should have large sensitivity and extremely low noise floor. Sensitivity of accelerometers is inversely proportional to the frequency squared. Commercial MEMS (Micro Electro-Mechanical System) accelerometers that are generally designed for large bandwidth (e.g 25kHz in ADXL150) have poor sensor level sensitivity and therefore uses complex signal conditioning electronics to achieve large sensitivity and low noise floor which in turn results in higher cost. In this work, an attempt has been made to design MEMS capacitive and piezoresistive accelerometers for smaller bandwidth using IntelliSuite and CoventorWare MEMS tools respectively. The various performance metrics have been obtained using simulation experiments and the results show that these sensors have excellent voltage sensitivity, noise performance and high resolution at sensor level and are even superior to commercial MEMS accelerometers.