An Improved Calibration Technique for MEMS Accelerometer-Based Inclinometers

Micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) accelerometer-based inclinometers are widely used to measure deformations of civil structures. To further improve the measurement accuracy, a new calibration technique was proposed in this paper. First, a single-parameter calibration model was constructed to obtain accurate angles. Then, an image-processing-based method was designed to obtain the key parameter for the calibration model. An ADXL355 accelerometer-based inclinometer was calibrated to evaluate the feasibility of the technique. In this validation experiment, the technique was proven to be reliable and robust. Finally, to evaluate the performance of the technique, the calibrated MEMS inclinometer was used to measure the deflections of a scale beam model. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique can yield accurate deformation measurements for MEMS inclinometers.