Development of an accurate low-cost device for structural vibration acquisition

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applications are getting tremendous attention from engineers; However, the expensive sensors and equipment needed for extracting the structures' modal characteristics made SHM application only applicable to singular structures with a high budget for their health assessment. For applying the SHM systems to structures with lower health evaluation budget, a new accurate and low-cost device is proposed for the measurements of structural vibrations. This is composed of five similar simultaneous accelerometers located on a same spot for measuring the same signal. For validating the accuracy of this device, laboratory experiments were carried on; subsequently, the out-puts of the proposed device were compared with two piezoelectric accelerometers (PCB 393A03 and PCB 356B18). The results of the experiments show that not only is the proposed device 14 times less expensive than PCB 393A03, but it can also acquire vibration on lower frequencies and acceleration amplitudes where the expensive sensors could not provide any outputs.

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