Numerical prototyping of low cost vibration sensor systems using data acquisition software

This paper presents the numerical prototyping i. e. simulation of vibration sensor systems, to be implemented as low cost systems in machines and technical facilities. A micromachined acceleration sensor is supplemented by an analog Sallen Key Butterworth filter and a microcontroller. Within the microcontroller a second filter, a Windowed Sinc FIR filter is implemented for data reduction, followed by an FFT. The two stage filter is used to get rid of the influence of the tolerances of the analog filter, since in low cost applications an additional adjustment should be avoided. The sensor system is simulated in Labview^®, a standard data acquisition software. Labview is chosen, since it has the possibility to do a numerical simulation of the sensor system and additionally using real measured vibration data as input data, thus performing a Hardware-in-the-loop-simulation (HIL). The simulation of the sensor system gives the capability to optimize system parameters in advance of building a hardware system.