Effect of Uneven Electrostatic Forces on the Dynamic Characteristics of Capacitive Hemispherical Resonator Gyroscopes

Abstract

The hemispherical resonator gyroscope (HRG) is a typical capacitive Coriolis vibratory gyroscope whose performance is inevitably influenced by the uneven electrostatic forces caused by the uneven excitation capacitance gap between the resonator and outer base. First, the mechanism of uneven electrostatic forces due to the significantly uneven capacitance gap in that the non-uniformity of the electrostatic forces can cause irregular deformation of the resonator and further affect the performance and precision of the HRG, was analyzed. According to the analyzed influence mechanism, the dynamic output error model of the HRG was established. In this work, the effect of the first four harmonics of the uneven capacitance gap on the HRG was investigated. It turns out that the zero bias and output error, caused by the first harmonic that dominates mainly the amplitude of the uneven capacitance gap, increase approximately linearly with the increase of the amplitude, and periodically vary with the increase of the phase. The effect of the other three harmonics follows the same law, but their amplitudes are one order of magnitude smaller than that of the first one, thus their effects on the HRG can be neglected. The effect of uneven electrostatic forces caused by the first harmonic on the scale factor is that its nonlinearity increases approximately linearly with the increase of the harmonic amplitude, which was analyzed in depth. Considering comprehensively the zero bias, the modification rate of output error, and scale factor nonlinearity, the tolerance towards the uneven excitation capacitance gap was obtained.