Measuring Acceleration in Vehicles using the AccBox System : Results and Discussion

The goal of the project was to measure accelerations in cars, buses and motorcycles. A cubic wooden box was built and three (two-axis) acceleration sensors were installed. A Matlab-program that filters the signal and calculates the acceleration components was developed. Measuring the angular acceleration was more complicated than expected. With the current setup and software the box only measures the linear accelerations in three dimensions. The accelerations of cars and buses tested never exceed 1 g under normal urban driving. The motorcycle tested reached 2 g accelerations in the x-y-plane and 4 g in the z-direction