The Theoretical and Experimental Study of a Novel Two-Dimensional Magnetic Fluid Accelerometer

The magnetic fluid has been used in the accelerometers to improve the performance owing to its characteristics of fluidity and paramagnetism. In this paper, a novel 2-D magnetic fluid accelerometer is proposed. The restoring force of the accelerometer is generated by the first-order levitation of the magnetic fluid, which also keeps the inertial mass in the levitation state. A method to simulate the first-order levitation force of the magnetic fluid is proposed and it turns out to be in good agreement with the experimental result. The output of the accelerometer is theoretically and experimentally studied and the theoretical output curve is similar with the experimental curve. Besides, the experimental result shows the accelerometer has a good linearity of better than 2.45% in the x-axis and better than 1.57% in the y-axis at a range of 0-0.625 g.