Design and Modeling of Micromachined Thermal Convective Gyroscope with Bidirectional Jets

This paper presents the design and modeling of a micromachined thermal convective gyroscope with bidirectional jets. Unlike earlier reported thermal convective gyroscopes, the proposed gyroscope comprises two chambers for gas jet deflection. Mathematical analysis was applied to investigate the centrifugal acceleration coupling in both single directional jet detection method and bidirectional jets detection method. Analysis results revealed that bidirectional jets detection method can effectively reduce centrifugal acceleration coupling which induces the nonlinearity of the output electric signal. The applicable range of bidirectional jets detection method is twice wider than that of single directional jet detection method. Numerical simulation was applied to investigate the gyroscope performance, which concluded that the temperature difference DeltaT shows good linearity to the angular rate omega, the nonlinearity is 0.6%. The sensitivity of the proposed gyroscope was estimated to be 1.26mV/deg/s with the supply voltage of 15 V.