Purpose: To provide insight into vibration dampening. This is only a recommendation by Inertial Labs. It is ultimately up to the user to decide for his/herself what the best solution is for their system.

Last Updated: October 2019

When using Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), vibration dampening is always a valuable concern. The reason for this is due to excess vibrations having the ability saturate data output streams from the Inertial Navigation System (INS).
For units that utilize the 15g tri-axial accelerometers, a good rule of thumb is to mitigate vibrations that average larger than 4g’s Root Mean Square (RMS) in acceleration. As previously stated, this will prevent data from being saturated and less desirable for navigation.

A good way to analyze what kind of vibrations the INS will experience on a test platform is to configure the INS in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) to output high-frequency IMU data over one of its designated communication ports and logging the data. This high-frequency IMU data (logged at 2kHz) can then be used to build and plot a vibration spectrum to see all vibration frequencies that could effect the INS.

The Inertial Labs support team is on stand-by to help support customers dealing with excessive vibration issues. Whether it’s recommending a solution, or helping to analyze data, we are eager to help with issues that may arise when integrating a solution. Raise a support ticket or search for related issues in our Support Portal.