Piezo Accelerometer Temperature Chamber

Project goal: To design and build a testing apparatus that provides a safe environment in which to bring piezoaccelerometers up to 260-600 degrees Celsius while vibrating 100 Hz at ±1.0 g of acceleration. Caterpillar’s quality control procedures include vibration testing on its equipment using piezoaccelerometers, which export test data to a data acquisition system for subsequent analysis by Caterpillar engineers. Piezoaccelerometer manufacturers, however,do not provide testing or calibration data for some of the temperatures at which Caterpillar operates its equipment, which means that the exported test data might be unreliable. The apparatus designed contains the heat around the accelerometer while keeping delicate electronics from overheating. Combined heat transfer and vibrational analyses provided the correct conditions for the inside of the testing apparatus, and heat transfer calculations determined the amount of insulation required to make the outside surface safe to work with.