A Comprehensive Review on Low-Cost MEMS Accelerometers for Vibration Measurement: Types, Novel Designs, Performance Evaluation, and Applications

Maintenance of mechanical elements is considered to be the most crucial task in industry and affects the economics, predominantly. There are many techniques available for fault diagnosis and condition monitoring of rotatory machine elements and one of the popular tools is vibration monitoring. Analyzing vibrations would be useful in supervising equipment/machine components in an attempt to detect the significant change which is the cause of growing failures or faults. Broadly speaking, it comes under prognostics and health monitoring (PHM) and prevents unexpected failure and costly repair. Proficient predictive monitoring and on-board recognition of failures is a need of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Several types of vibration analyzers and sensors are commercially available, however, their total budget is not affordable. This motivates reviewing the suitability of low-cost sensors for vibration monitoring. An inclusive review of a variety of applications wherein microelectromechanical system (MEMS)-based accelerometer is used is presented in this paper. This would support an open-design movement for creating open.