ABSTRACT
An increasing number of researchers are working on Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applications. However, the high price of traditional commercial accelerometers is known to be one of the significant drawbacks of SHM methods. On the one hand, to apply SHM applications to structures with a lower budget dedicated for their health and safety assessments, development of low-cost sensors can be an answer. On the other hand, low-cost sensors are known to have lower accuracy and resolution compared with those of traditional commercial accelerometers. For the first time in the literature, this paper represents a methodology for improving the resolution and accuracy of low-cost, low-resolution accelerometers. To do so, this paper proposes averaging the outputs of several aligned synchronized low-cost accelerometers.
The validity of the proposed methodology has been examined through a series of laboratory experiments. These experiments tested accelerometers made from one, two, three, four and five combined MPU9250 chipsets on a shaking table. Moreover, two commercial accelerometers (393A03 and 356B18) were used to validate the accuracy of the developed solutions.
