Low-cost accurate acceleration acquisition sensor

Nowadays, accelerometers are used widely by civil engineers for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) purposes. The expensive cost of acquisition equipment and accelerometers have made the SHM applications unavailable for structures with relatively low budgets for their assessment.A new accelerometer has been proposed in this paper. This accelerometer is a uniaxial accelerometer with a sampling frequency of up to 85Hz. Although the proposed accelerometer is 17 times cheaper than a traditional accelerometer (PCB 393A03), it provides a better resolution and accuracy at the same time. An experimental test has been carried out for comparing the proposed accelerometer with PCB 393A03 sensor.