Hi everyone,
I'm totally new to Arduino, but I need to do a project in which I have to use an accelerometer to measure the acceleration of an hammer impacting with a hip prostheses. I think that I'd need at least a range of 40g, better more, and a relatively high sample frequency. Do you have any suggestion? I have already the ADXL345 but the range is not enough I guess. I need something quite low cost because is for university and the budget is really low. I was looking at the ADXL372, do you think it'd be suitable? Is it too difficult to use? Thanks again!
Thankyou!
Pick an accelerometer that has the range you need and can be sampled fast enough to make the required measurements.
The latter consideration will take some thought, the information in the sensor data sheets and some experimentation just to decide how to actually perform the measurement, so it probably doesn't matter that much where you start.
The final consideration will be: how do you calibrate the sensor so that the measurements actually mean something?
The very first Google hit on the search phrase...
hammer impacting with a hip prostheses
...was this article https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5125605/ ...
...which includes the following interesting and somewhat gruesome picture, and details about their set-up, which included a "dynamic piezoelectric force sensor (208C05, PCB Piezotronics, Depew, New York, USA)" and "data acquisition module (NI 9234, National Instruments, Austin, TX, USA) with a sampling frequency of 51.2 kHz and a resolution of 24 bits....A Labview (National Instrument, Austin TX, USA) interface was used to record the signals corresponding to the force applied between the hammer and the ancillary for a duration of 2.5 ms."
So that may be a good place to start.
I agree with DaveEvans. I think you need professional data aquisition hardware to measure the impact pulse.
A "poor man's solution" could be a USB scope of 25 dollars with a analog sensor. For example the LHT00SU1 with PulseView/sigrok: Noname LHT00SU1 - sigrok. Then you have a cheap single analog channel recorder. However, I don't know a cheap single-axis sensor.
Hitting something is not 40G, the peak is more likely 100G or above.
I think you need a professional sensor. They are indeed often 3-axis piezo force sensors.
To measure it with an Arduino, perhaps a fast Teensy board can do it (it is arduino-compatible): Teensy USB Development Board. If you use an analog sensor, then you can use the analog inputs of the Teensy boards. I don't know what their maximum sample rate is.