Issue link: https://resources.mouser.com/i/1512203
54 ADI | Engineering a More Sustainable Future Figure 7. Enclosure for ADXL357 triaxial MEMS sensor and ADIN1110 10BASE- T1L MAC-PHY circuitry. Figure 8. MEMS and piezo range of sensors for wired applications. 8 Choosing a Suitable MEMS Vibration Sensor What Specifications Do We Need to Look Out for When Choosing an Accelerometer? While there is no official standard that categorizes vibration sensors, they can be assigned into categories using their effective resolution as shown in Figure 8. It can be clearly seen that MEMS accelerometers cover a small area compared to piezoelectric sensors. MEMS accelerometers have been designed for many application specific uses such as airbag crash detection, roll-over detection in vehicles, robotic arm positioning, platform stabilization, precision tilt detection, and many more. MEMS manufacturers developed sensors good enough to compete with IEPE vibration sensors only a few years ago and, as a result, this technology is still in its infancy, hence the smaller area of coverage for wired CbM installations, as shown on the left in Figure 8. However, this is expected to grow in the coming years as more MEMS vendors invest in condition monitoring vibration sensor solutions. MEMS sensors offer some advantages that are proving disruptive in the world of vibration sensors. For example, the vast majority of MEMS sensors available on the market have three axes, integrated ADCs, digital filtering, excellent linearity, low cost, and low weight, and they are very small compared to piezoelectric or IEPE/ICP sensors, as highlighted in Table 5. While IEPE sensors will continue to be used on the most critical assets, maintenance and facility managers are looking to extract deeper insights from less critical assets in a shift toward extracting better productivity, efficiency, and sustainability—that is, minimizing unplanned downtime and prolonging the lifetime of assets. Lower cost and performance sensors, whether they be MEMS or IEPE, will be used in such scenarios, which raises the question: is a single-axis IEPE sensor with superior noise and bandwidth performance always a better choice than a MEMS sensor with three axes? 7