Design of a Flexible Array-Based Displacement Amplifier for Capacitive Accelerometers

Abstract

This work is focused on the design of a Displacement amplifier Compliance Mechanism, with the incorporation of a structure like a Pantograph (DaCMP). This structure is applied to a Capacitive Accelerometer of Extended Beams (CAEB) of a middle size, generating a CAEB-DaCMP system. The response of the reduced mass accelerometer, or CAEB, was also improved by incorporating symmetrical arms, which consists of sectioning the total length of each arm into 6 segments and changing the width of 4 of these in proportion 8/10 of the total width. An improvement in displacement and frequency parameters of CAEB-DaCMP, with symmetrical arms, was obtained, with respect to the half-size CAEB, of 178.45% in displacement and a 12.07% in frequency. An improvement in displacement (27.68%) was obtained comparing the CAEB-DaCMP, with symmetric arms, with respect to the original CAEB-DaCM system previously reported, with a slight decrease in frequency (7.25%).