Determine displacement from acceleration data

[Eastern]

Hello

I have a data set that includes pitch, roll and acceleration data collected at 10Hz.

The sensor is mounted on the end of a boom used onboard a ship.

I would like to calculate vertical displacement from the acceleration data with the goal being a plot of displacement vs time.

What would be the best approach for the calculation? 

How do I minimize the drift in the result?

Thanks,

[jallen88]

Eastern,

I did a little searching around, and there are many resources on the web that detail different approaches for retrieving position from acceleration data. The largest challenge is minimizing the impact of noise in the accelerometer on the calculated displacement data.

There are a number of useful discussions on physicsforums.com: Google search: site:physicsforums.com Determine displacement from acceleration data

A research paper written on this subject, detailing different methods and considerations for each can be found here: USING THE FFT- DDI METHOD TO MEASURE DISPLACEMENTS WITH PIEZOELECTRIC, RESISTIVE AND ICP ACCELEROMET...

[preston_johnson]

The sound and vibration measurement suite includes proven and robust integration functions for converting from acceleration to velocity andisplacement.  That being said

Consider a low pass filter toremove noise

Use a high pass filter to remove dc

Integrate twice to get displacement, follow commonplace  math to convert units.