Compact in-plane dual-axis spring-steel accelerometer

Khan, Sambuddha and Prasanna, Deepa and Ananthasuresh, GK (2012) Compact in-plane dual-axis spring-steel accelerometer. In: 5th ISSS National Conference on MEMS, Smart Materials, Structures and Systems, September 21-22, 2012, Coimbatore, India.

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Abstract

Presented in this paper is an improvement over a spring-steel dual-axis accelerometer that we had reported earlier.The fabrication process (which entails wire-cut electro discharge machining of easily accessible and inexpensive spring-steelfoil) and the sensing of the displacement (which is done using off-the-shelf Hall-effect sensors) remain the same. Theimprovements reported here are twofold: (i) the footprint of the packaged accelerometer is reduced from 80 mm square to 40mm square, and (ii) almost perfect de-coupling and symmetry are achieved between the two in-plane axes of the packageddevice as opposed to the previous embodiment where this was not the case. Good linearity with about 40 mV/g was measuredalong both the in-plane axes over a range of 0.1 to 1 g. The first two natural frequencies of the devices are at 30 Hz and 100Hz, respectively, as per the experiment. The highlights of this work are cost-effective processing, easy integration of the Hall-effect sensing capability on a customised printed circuit board, and inexpensive packaging without overly compromising eitherthe overall size or the sensitivity of the accelerometer. Through this work, we have reaffirmed the practicability of spring-steelaccelerometers towards the eventual goal of making it compete with micro machined silicon accelerometers in terms of sizeand performance. The cost is likely to be much lower for the spring-steel accelerometers than that of silicon accelerometers, especially when the volume of production is low and the sensor is to be used as a single packaged unit.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Publisher:	Institute of Smart Structures and Systems
Additional Information:	Copyright of this article belongs to Institute of Smart Structures and Systems.
Keywords:	Accelerometer; Dual-Axis; Hall-Effect Sensor; Spring Steel; Wire-Cut EDM
Department/Centre:	Division of Mechanical Sciences > Mechanical Engineering
Date Deposited:	13 Mar 2014 06:53
Last Modified:	13 Mar 2014 06:53
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/48616

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