Design, Fabrication, and Performance Analysis of Intelligent Mesoscale Capacitive Accelerometer for Vibration Measurement

This paper portrays an accelerometer as a motion sensor used to measure acceleration, vibration, and tilt angles which plays a vital role in the constructional field, inertial measurements, automotive safety system, biomedical, and yet other safety applications. A small packaged accelerometer can be made larger in size by acquiring an external power source or battery. The designed micro-accelerometer is fabricated using clean room technology, which is not quite cost effective, and even the silicon base is replaced by steel because of steel’s high yield strength and low cost to fabricate a mesoscale accelerometer. Design parameters are optimized by a Decision Tree Algorithm where the optimized dimensions are used to model the mesoscale accelerometer in INTELLISUITE 8.6 software. A Wire-cut discharger is used for the fabrication of mechanical elements of an accelerometer with a spring steel foil to reduce fabrication cost. Finally, the fabricated accelerometer with a mesoscale was made to undergo experimentation with a hammer drill and compared with simulation results to evaluate its performance in a harsh construction environment. 0.576 (μm/g) of mechanical sensitivity and 0.629 (pF/g) of electrical sensitivity is achieved.