Study and elaboration of accelerometer with large measure range – RAGE

Thermal accelerometers have emerged as a technological breakthrough compared with traditional pendulum accelerometers that are poorly suited to withstand high shocks and accelerations.
In the convective thermal accelerometers architecture, a warmed air mass is used instead of a mechanical structure. As a result these sensors can maintain accelerations greater than 20,000 g and, in addition, are able to measure the acceleration at such levels.
The main purpose of this project is to use to develop a convective thermal accelerometer to measure an acceleration ranging from few 1000 to more than 10,000 g.
In addition, the use of batch microfabrication techniques will significantly reduce volume, footprint and power consumption as well as achieve competitive manufacturing costs.
Targeted applications will be both in consumer products markets and defense. Regarding the latter, main applications will be the on-board computing of initial velocity of guns and ammunition and the impact management of penetrators.
In the civil market, such devices would be used as sensors of shock or vibration amplitudes in wide industrial sectors such as transportation, aerospace, civil engineering, oil exploration, ...
At this time, very few acceleration sensors operate in the considered range with both stability and accuracy. The mature "piezo-resistive" technology, mainly developed in North America, is not cost effective to be mounted in series in such ammunitions.
Therefore, the development of the convective thermal accelerometer is a major innovation and improvement in this field. Furthermore, the use of a new principle for detecting temperature variations based on pyroelectric materials should also provide a gain in performance, especially in terms of bandwidth.