HRG Crystal™ DUAL CORE: Rebooting the INS revolution

Safran Electronics & Defense’s hemispherical resonator gyroscope, the HRG Crystal™, has widely proven its ability to fulfill performances requirements usually reached by optical technologies (RLG and FOG), with the best C-SWaP1 characteristics and much higher reliability (cf. DARPA latest study [5]).Based on HRG Crystal™ technology, Safran Electronics & Defense has developed a new type of inertial core called HRG Crystal™ DUAL CORE, able to reach higher performances similar to the ones achieved by ESG technology.Indeed, thanks to the unrivalled C-SWaP of HRG Crystal™ for navigation grade gyro, the integration of multi sensors cores in a single cluster-core, made of 6 HRG Crystal™ gyroscopes (instead of 3 for “standard” cores), and accelerometers, becomes possible.The DUAL CORE principle, patented by Safran Electronics & Defense, relies on resonator gyroscopes’ intrinsic characteristic: its self calibration capability. Thus, in a DUAL CORE, while 3 gyros are navigating, the 3 others are self calibrating, strongly increasing the inertial system’s accuracy.HRG Crystal™ DUAL CORE allows Safran Electronics & Defense to address the most demanding applications with breakthrough products. For instance, in the naval market, Safran has launched at Euronaval 2018 the Black-Onyx™ DUAL CORE, an INS for submarines that addresses the market with unreached performances: better than 0.5 NM/120h.There is no doubt that, in the near future, other defense sectors, like land and aeronautics, will be addressed with HRG Crystal™ DUAL CORE inertial systems, as the need of extended performances, with better C-SWaP, becomes more and more significant each day.