Honeycomb-Like Disk Resonator Gyroscope

In this paper, we report a novel honeycomb-like disk resonator gyroscope (HDRG) and its comprehensive test results. HDRG inherits many advantages from traditional nested-ring disk resonator such as axisymmetric structure and huge capacitive area. In addition, HDRG owns unique characteristics and potentials due to its topology structure, namely, higher immunity to fabrication errors, better resonant mode consistency and better inner electrode arrangement. This new design of HDRG is based on a tradeoff between performance parameters including quality factor, decaying time constant, effective mass, effective capacitive area, transducer sensitivity and mechanical noise. The characteristics and potentials of HDRG are investigated firstly. Afterwards, the parameter optimization and frame structure optimization of HDRG are investigated. Based on the investigation, a novel HDRG is proposed. A prototype of this design is fabricated and its overall performance is tested. Results show that the quality factor of HDRG increases from 81.1k to 171.6k and the decaying time constant increases from 1.507 s to 6.973 s. The bias instability of the gyroscope reaches 0.11 °/h at room temperature without any compensation, more than eighty times smaller than the former design, exhibiting significant performance improvement. Moreover, ranging from −40 °C to 60 °C, the temperature coefficient of scale factor is 0.188%/ °C, and the maximum variations of zero offset and bias instability over temperature are 40 °/h and 0.12 °/h respectively, showing good robustness to environment disturbance. This new gyroscope has the potential to operate steadily under variable temperature conditions, offering as a new type of MEMS gyroscope with high performance and good robustness.