An isogeometric analysis based design of highly sensitive and precise omnidirectional piezoelectric-fiber accelerometer

Measuring omnidirectional acceleration is highly important for robust control of the vehicle states. A novel omnidirectional accelerometer with three piezoelectric curved-fibers is designed by using the genetic algorithm based optimization method. The isogeometric analysis (IGA) is utilized to analyze the strain induced voltage outputs of curved piezoelectric fibers, which can also guarantee high computation accuracy and significantly reduce the amounts of calculation in the optimization procedure compared to the finite element method. Employing cylindrical piezoelectric three fibers, the cross-axis sensitivities of the x and z axes of the omnidirectional accelerometer is eliminated completely in theory, which ensures the detection precision of magnitude and direction of 3D acceleration. The output voltages of proposed curved three-fiber accelerometer in x and y axes respective are higher than the fully decoupled accelerometer with three orthogonal fibers. The sensor also exhibits high sensitivity in very low frequency range of [0.01 Hz, 5 Hz], and numerical simulated sensitivity can reach 7.42 to 13.41 V/g, which is 78% to 155% higher than that of the omnidirectional accelerometer with three parallel straight-fibers.