Accelerometers are key components of various motion control systems ranging in use from inertial guidance of rockets and satellite launch vehicles to safety applications in the automotive industry. The accelerometers that are used for spare inertial systems are characterized by high resolution, small bandwidth, large working range and excellent linearity. Current advances in this field are based on silicon micromachining. Silicon bulk and surface micromachined accelerometers offer advantages of reduced size and weight, less power consumption and the use of a fabrication process derived form an already well established semiconductor fab technology. Of the various approaches to silicon micromachined accelerometers, two are in a well advanced state of development. The first is the capacitive force balanced type and the second the piezoresistive type. The capacitive approach has the advantage of higher stability and resolution and lower temperature coefficients. But it requires proximal detection circuitry to prevent parasitics to overwhelm the circuit. A new approach reported recently uses a silicon micromachined cantilever beam which acts as a Fabry Perot interferometer when light from an optical fiber is impinged on it. In this paper we overview all the approaches and try to select a suitable candidate for use in space borne inertial systems.
Silicon micromachined accelerometers for space inertial systems
1999
9 Seiten, 8 Quellen
Conference paper
English
Micromachined accelerometers for inertial navigation applications
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