A Temperature Compensation Model for Low Cost Quartz Accelerometers and Its Application in Tilt Sensing

Abstract

Although the quartz accelerometer has made great advances, the performance, in some specific applications such as tilt sensing, needs to be well compensated in high temperature environment. Based on the high temperature testing of low cost quartz accelerometers, we found that the normalized positive and negative parts are asymmetrical at high temperature and the temperature curve of zero sensor output is related to the roll angle of the sensor. Traditional temperature compensation method only considers the temperature factor and ignores the roll sensitivity, which leads to deteriorated accuracy. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel and simple mathematical model to obtain a more accurate expression of zero sensor output, which makes the sensor output more robust at high temperature. Experimental results on two low cost quartz accelerometers demonstrate that the proposed model is feasible and effective, which could reduce the temperature drift error of the sensor output typically from 0.01 g to 0.001 g. Furthermore, we introduce the compensated sensors in the three-axis inclinometer system for tilt sensing, and the evaluation results show that the temperature drift error of the inclination in the range (20 & deg; C, 150 & deg; C) is reduced typically from 0.4 & deg; to 0.1 & deg; compared to the traditional method.