A Modified Hopkinson Pressure Bar Experiment to Evaluate a Damped Piezoresistive MEMS Accelerometer

We conducted a series of modified Hopkinson pressure bar (HPB) experiments to evaluate a new, damped, high-shock accelerometer that has recently been developed by PCB Piezotronics Inc. Pulse shapers were used to create a long duration, non-dispersive stress pulse in an aluminum bar that interacted with a tungsten disk at the end of the incident bar. We measured stress at the aluminum bar-disk interface with a quartz gage and measured acceleration at the free-end of the disk with an Endevco brand 7270A and the new PCB 3991 accelerometers. The rise-time of the incident stress pulse in the aluminum bar was long enough and the disk length short enough so that the response of the disk can be approximated closely as rigid-body motion; an experimentally verified analytical model has been shown previously to support this assumption. Since the cross-sectional area and mass of the disk were known, we calculated acceleration of the rigid-disk from the quartz-gage force measurement and Newton's Second Law of Motion. Comparisons of accelerations calculated from the quartz-gage data and measured acceleration data show excellent agreement for acceleration pulses with the PCB accelerometer for peak amplitudes between 4,000 and 40,000 Gs , rise times as short as 40more » microsec, and pulse durations between 150 and 320 microsec.« less