Honeywell Delivers Three Million Quartz Accelerometers to Customers

At Honeywell, we’re passionate about helping our customers get from point A to B with highly accurate sensors. Though aerospace implies planes and spacecraft, our navigation sensors are not limited to things that fly but really anything that moves or may do so.

Our quartz accelerometers are used above ground, below ground, on ground and in space. Recently, a major delivery milestone with our quartz accelerometers reminds me how many customers we get to help on their journeys.

In 2020, we delivered our 3,000,000th accelerometer.   

Since these accelerometers are usually used in a triad, or a cluster of three to measure the three independent axes of motion, it means we’ve helped more than one million customers measure, navigate or steer their products, businesses or services.

Honeywell’s QA-2000 Accelerometers are used for navigation because of their unparalleled accuracy, durability and quality.

 

Honeywell has been manufacturing, innovating and delivering quartz accelerometers since the 1970s to address varying customer needs from navigation to oil and gas exploration.

Today our product offerings include a large family of quartz resonant beam accelerometers (RBAs) and quartz flexure force-rebalance accelerometers (Q-flex™) designed to serve a variety of applications.   

Where did these 3,000,000 accelerometers go?  

Our quartz accelerometers are on planes, trains and automobiles, and are used in other Honeywell navigation products such as LASEREF, TALIN, EGI, MIMU, HG1700, HG1900 and the HG9900.  

These Honeywell products fly on passenger airplanes, business jets, cargo planes, military aircraft, navigate surface vehicles, and enable the most complicated of space missions to Mars or to the outer reaches of the solar system, just to name a few.

We also sell quartz accelerometers as stand-alone sensors. In these applications, they are used in trains to perform railway track monitoring, autonomous vehicles to characterize vehicle motion, and underwater to navigate vehicles mapping out the ocean floor. Honeywell even makes a special type of accelerometer that is customized for the rugged and harsh environments of energy exploration.

I asked Steve Becka, one of our Engineering fellows, to help me explain just how sensitive our best accelerometers are. Steve explained that our best Q-Flex accelerometers are expected to deliver 165dB or more of dynamic range with a sensitivity of about ½ of a millionth of a g-force in nearly any environment. This level of precision is like being able to weigh a Boeing 747 to the nearest gram or two if you had a massive scale.

Besides being incredibly sensitive, Honeywell accelerometers are known for being extremely robust, reliable and durable to provide accurate acceleration data under the toughest conditions imaginable, including extreme temperatures and high vibration levels.   

Extraordinary teamwork, extraordinary results

While innovation and design have been paramount to such a storied product line, three million parts aren’t delivered without a remarkable manufacturing team. Manufacturing continues to be a large part of our success. Honeywell has embraced Six Sigma and our unique Honeywell Operating System (HOS) to drive superior product quality, minimum variation and uniform performance across our accelerometer product line.

As an indicator of durability, our navigation-grade accelerometers have more than three million cumulative flight hours under their belt and that number continues to grow with every flight.

We are humbled to serve our customers in so many ways. I can’t wait to hear about the next amazing use for our quartz accelerometers!

To learn more about our quartz accelerometers, please click here.