Experimental And Numerical Studies on Mechanical Resonance of Piezoelectric Hemispherical Resonator Gyroscope

The Hemispherical Resonator Gyroscope (HRG) is a low-noise, high-performance angular rate sensor, or rotation sensor with a small footprint. A thin, solid-state hemispherical shell is used to fabricate the HRG, which is anchored by a thick stem. In the present study a mesoscale model of HRG was fabricated. The fabricated device is tested using a noncontact approach to measure its natural frequencies and drive and sense directions. Finite element analysis was carried out using commercial software COMSOL multiphysics to validate the experimentally obtained frequencies of the gyroscope. Numerically obtained drive and sense mode frequencies were found to be within 8% of the measured values.