Rapid prototyping of a piezoelectric six-axis accelerometer

In this paper, the method to develop the rapid prototyping of the piezoelectric six-axis accelerometer based on the principle of a six-axis accelerometer proposed by the authors is introduced, which accesses the six degree-of-freedom (DOF) acceleration of the body frame by decoupling the output equations of the six single-axis accelerometers mounted on a rigid body. Utilizing the dSPACE rapid control prototyping (RCP) system, the rapid prototyping of the piezoelectric six-axis accelerometer based on the RCP technique is established. Moreover, the corresponding experimental set-up and experimental results to verify the rapid prototyping of the six-axis accelerometer are presented and analyzed. The experimental results show that the developed rapid prototyping system of the piezoelectric six-axis accelerometer can sense the six-DOF acceleration. The research works in this paper establish the foundation for the development of the piezoelectric six-axis accelerometers.