Present and Future of Acceleration and Pressure Measurement Systems

This paper's goal is to provide an overview of the currently available acceleration and pressure measurement systems and to provide future trends in this area of instrumentation. The first four sections provide the fundamental theory behind piezoelectric, piezoresistive and variable capacitance accelerometers. Section five compares these different accelerometer types. Section six explains how pressure transducers work. Section seven provides an overview of the signal conditioners needed to interface with the previously discussed transducers. Section eight describes trends of these measurement systems.