title: Feasibility of frequency-modulated wireless transmission for a multi-purpose MEMS-based accelerometer.
abstract: Recent advances in the Micro Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) technology have made wireless MEMS accelerometers an attractive tool for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of civil engineering structures. To date, sensors' low sensitivity and accuracy--especially at very low frequencies--have imposed serious limitations for their application in monitoring large-sized structures. Conventionally, the MEMS sensor's analog signals are converted to digital signals before radio-frequency (RF) wireless transmission. The conversion can cause a low sensitivity to the important low-frequency and low-amplitude signals. To overcome this difficulty, the authors have developed a MEMS accelerometer system, which converts the sensor output voltage to a frequency-modulated signal before RF transmission. This is achieved by using a Voltage to Frequency Conversion (V/F) instead of the conventional Analog to Digital Conversion (ADC). In this paper, a prototype MEMS accelerometer system is presented, which consists of a transmitter and receiver circuit boards. The former is equipped with a MEMS accelerometer, a V/F converter and a wireless RF transmitter, while the latter contains an RF receiver and a F/V converter for demodulating the signal. The efficacy of the MEMS accelerometer system in measuring low-frequency and low-amplitude dynamic responses is demonstrated through extensive laboratory tests and experiments on a flow-loop pipeline.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica, Energetica e Gestionale (DIMEG), Università della Calabria, Via P. Bucci 46C, Rende (CS), Italy. sabatoale@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sabato
authors.affiliation: Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics Department (CEEM), Columbia University, 500 W 120th St., New York, NY 10027, USA. mqf2101@columbia.edu.
authors.forename: Maria Q
authors.initials: MQ
authors.lastname: Feng