An aerosol deposition based MEMS piezoelectric accelerometer for low noise measurement

Potentially applied in low-noise applications such as structural health monitoring (SHM), a 1-axis piezoelectric MEMS accelerometer based on aerosol deposition is designed, fabricated, simulated, and measured in this study. It is a cantilever beam structure with a tip proof mass and PZT sensing layer. To figure out whether the design is suitable for SHM, working bandwidth and noise level are obtained via simulation. For the first time, we use aerosol deposition method to deposit thick PZT film during the fabrication process to achieve high sensitivity. In performance measurement, we obtain the charge sensitivity, natural frequency, working bandwidth and noise equivalent acceleration of 22.74 pC/g, 867.4 Hz, 10–200 Hz (within ±5% deviation) and 5.6 µg/√Hz (at 20 Hz). To demonstrate its feasibility for real applications, vibrations of a fan are measured by our designed sensor and a commercial piezoelectric accelerometer, and the results match well with each other. Moreover, shaker vibration measurement with ADXL1001 indicates that the fabricated sensor has a much lower noise level. In the end, we show that our designed accelerometer has good performance compared to piezoelectric MEMS accelerometers in relevant studies and great potential for low-noise applications compared to low-noise capacitive MEMS accelerometers.