In the past, I have been under the impression that accelerometers were primarily used for the detection of stronger signals and therefore less sensitive than geophones. However, that was an OLD preception.
What is the modern sensitivity comparison of these devices?
Jerry:
Your perception remains valid.
You can think of them broadly in this way: Where the velocity sensor clips, the accelerometer sensor comes into play. Most inexpensive accelerometers (MEMs) only measure motion that humans can feel. The Shake’s MEMs has a considerable overlap with the geophone and can perceive motion humans cannot feel, though not by a lot.
You can see some graphs that show the relative sensitivities here: https://manual.raspberryshake.org/_downloads/SpecificationsforRaspberryShake4DMEMSV4.pdf.
branden
Thank you, Braden. That is what I thought I had read years ago, but didn’t know about modern equipment.
Interesting. Thanks for your answer. That makes me wonder if you are also using some kind of sensor fusion (e.g. Kalman Filtering) to obtain a better estimate of the actual displacement. But i guess maybe you don’t really need to.
No need for Kalman filtering in this application, though I have played with it to “fuse” together signals from different sensors (gyroscopes, accelerometers and velocity sensors).
branden