A novel Earth’s gravity method for accelerometer calibration

Abstract

Advanced low frequency vibration calibration is imperative required as the wide applications of low frequency accelerometers. Low frequency calibration is commonly realized by the Earth’s gravity method or the laser interferometry. However, affected by the limited stroke of the standard vibration shaker, the calibration precision of laser interferometry at very low frequency is usually not ideal. Although the Earth’s gravity method can avoid this low calibration precision at very low frequency, its calibration frequency usually <5 Hz due to the influence of rotator centripetal acceleration. In this paper, the Earth’s gravity method mentioned in ISO 16063-16 is improved by using an effective image feature detection method. This method detects the angel between Earth’s gravity field direction and acceleration sensitivity axis direction to improve the Earth’s gravity static calibration accuracy.