The mechanical sensitivity optimization of a disk resonator gyroscope with mutative ring thickness

In this paper, we present the mechanical sensitivity improvement of a disk resonator gyroscope (DRG) by optimizing the thickness distribution of the nested rings. The mechanical sensitivities of the DRGs with uniform, linearly changing and step changing rings have been simulated. The results suggest that the ring thickness distribution has great influence on the performance of the DRG. Then the optimized ring thickness distribution was obtained by using the bio-inspired particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The rule of the optimized ring thickness distribution is that the outer ring is thicker than the other rings (1.7–1.8 times for this DRG) whereas the other rings should be as thin as possible. Meanwhile the optimized distribution rules can be used on series of DRGs and the optimization methods can be widely used on other MEMS devices.