In this paper a recursive least squares adaptive noise canceling method is
applied to estimate electrical signals coming from an accelerometer embedde
d in a bus under a performance test. Noise and/or interference corrupt this
electrical signal, and it is necessary to diminish the noise in measuring
the acceleration of the bus. The recursive least squares algorithm used in
this paper has the advantage of computational simplicity and is well suited
to represent time varying features in real-time measurements of the accele
ration. In this experiment the signal of interest and the noise have very c
lose bands of frequency to each other and it is very difficult to diminish
the noise using fixed filters. The experimental results have shown that the
adaptive filter acts as an adaptive notch filter whose null points are det
ermined by the frequency of the noise signal, and it achieved an improvemen
t of 20 dB of the signal-to-noise ratio. The experimental results demonstra
te the importance of using both analog signal conditioning and digital sign
al processing when we have to deal with signals corrupted by noise. (C) 200
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