Measurement of Acceleration Response Functions with Scalable Low-Cost Devices. An Application to the Experimental Modal Analysis

One of the most popular options in the Structural Health Monitoring field is the tracking of the modal parameters, which are estimated through the frequency response functions of the structure, usually in the form of accelerances, which are computed as the ratio between the measured accelerations and the applied forces. This requires the use of devices capable of synchronously recording accelerations at several points of the structure at high sampling rates and the subsequent computational analysis using the recorded data. To this end, this work presents and validates a new scalable acquisition system based on multiple myRIO devices and digital MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical System) accelerometers, intended for modal analysis of large structures. A simple form of this system was presented by the authors in a previous work, showing that a single board with some accelerometers connected to it got to obtain high quality measurements in both time and frequency domains. Now, a larger system composed by several slave boards connected and synchronized to a master one is presented. Delays lower than 100 ns are found between the synchronised channels of the proposed system. For validation purposes, a case study is presented where the devices are deployed on a timber platform to estimate its modal properties, which are compared with the ones provided by a commercial system, based on analog accelerometers, to show that similar results are obtained at a significantly lower cost.