But shakes, rattles, and rolls are always out of place in safe and stable motor vehicles. Let's go through the spec sheet item by item. Four accelerometer technologies compete to cover most applications. Piezoelectric accelerometers produce an electrical charge in response to mechanical stress, while piezoresistives alter resistance in response to stress.
Capacitive accelerometers offer true static-load response.
They work well for vehicular-suspension testing, which requires mathematical integration to obtain component velocity and position data. Early versions used resistive elements. Today's technology favors capacitive sensors to create truly integrated and very small accelerometers, typically packaged in surface-mount ICs. Besides instrumentation applications, tens of millions of MEMS accelerometers see service in automotive air-bag actuators. Amplitude range .