Pneumatically Operated Piston Shock Calibrator for Acceleration Sensors

—In order to provide fast, accurate, and low cost shock sensitivity calibration of acceleration sensors, a pneumatically operated piston shock calibrator based on ISO 16063-22 is designed. comparative calibration method is used to calibrate the shock sensitivity of tested sensor within a shock peak amplitude of 25 to 2000 g and a pulse duration of 0.1 to 3 ms. The pneumatically operated piston shock calibrator includes modules of mechanical shock, shock signal generation, and measurement control based on the NI data acquisition card and LabVIEW control program. Numerical analysis and calculation of the pneumatic ejection process by MATLAB is performed to analyze the influence factors and levels of the impact velocity. Moreover, experiments on key performance indexes and test data processing are carried out. The repeatability of shock peak amplitude and pulse duration are better than 1.24 and 2.19%, respectively, which reaches the level of the commercially available calibrator of the same type. Meanwhile, the calibrated uncertainty is 2.56% ( k = 2), which meets the ISO 16063-22 requirement with the accuracy of less than 5%.