Multi-accelerometer-based method for environmental vibration compensation in load cell measurements

Environmental vibrations can considerably affect sensor measurements in industrial equipments. In particular, in those machines where load cells are employed, environmental vibrations can impact on performances, both in terms of accuracy and productivity. Trying to overcome this problem by low-pass filtering load cell measurements is usually inconvenient since these filters unavoidably downgrade machine speed. This paper proposes a method for compensating environmental vibrations in load cell measurements which makes use of a suitable redundant set of distributed accelerometers, simplified kinematic relations and a load cell second order dynamic model. The method is validated by applying it to a multi-head weighing machine for the packaging industry. Experimental results are provided to prove the effectiveness of the method.