Transforming an Optical Pick-Up-Head Into an Accelerometer With UltraHigh Sensitivity

This paper proposes an accelerometer based on a commercial optical pick-up-head (PUH). An optical PUH is used to be part of an accelerometer by transforming the astigmatic measuring mechanism, the suspending wires, and the objective lens as the displacement sensor, the spring, and the seismic mass, respectively. Instead of adding an extra mass-damper-spring subsystem into the system in previous works, in our design we utilize the four suspending metal wires and the objective lens in an optical PUH. Thus, no extra component is needed and the system is more compact and easy to implement. Experimental results demonstrate that this cost-effective accelerometer has excellent linearity, ultrahigh sensitivity of 114 V/g, and an operating frequency of 20 Hz.