A low-cost vibration analyser for analogue electromagnetic shaker

This paper proposes a low-cost vibration analyser for a vibration-based shaker. The system comprises a refurbished analogue shaker, laser displacement sensors and data acquisition (DAQ) device. The laser displacement sensor captures the vibrational motion generated by the shaker. The data obtained from the laser displacement sensor is then amplified and transferred to a computer using a DAQ device. The system demonstrated close proximity to the analytical and simulation results in terms of determining the natural frequency of a cantilever beam, hence verifying the capability of the system for vibration analysis. The limitations of the system come from the analogue shaker and the sensitivity of the laser displacement sensors. Due to the attribute of an analogue machine, the shaker can only be operated manually. A sweep run is preferred to accommodate the low precision of the shaker. A frequency sweep speed between the range of 0.03 to 0.07 Hz per second should be used to ensure that the true amplitude of the test specimen can be obtained. A sampling rate of 20 kHz for the DAQ device is sufficient for the proposed system, while maintaining a proportional data size.