Modelling accelerometers for transient signals using calibration measurements upon sinusoidal excitation

A recently proposed accelerometer model is applied for determining the accelerometer's output to transient accelerations. The model consists of a linear, second-order differential equation with unknown coefficients. It is proposed to estimate these model parameters from sinusoidal calibration measurements, and an estimation procedure based on linear least-squares is presented. In addition, the uncertainties associated with the estimated parameters are determined utilizing a Monte Carlo simulation technique. The performance of the proposed modelling approach was tested by its application to calibration measurements of two back-to-back accelerometers (ENDEVCO type 2270 and Bruel & Kj ae r type 8305). For each of the two accelerometers, the model was first estimated from sinusoidal calibration measurements and then used to predict the accelerometer's behaviour for two shock calibration measurements. Measured and predicted shock sensitivities were found consistent with differences below 1% in most cases which confirms the benefit of the proposed modelling approach. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.