A Navigation-Grade Mems Vibrating Beam Accelerometer

Abstract

This paper reports on a differential MEMS vibrating beam accelerometer (VBA) demonstrating excellent stability for inertial navigation applications (bias instability < 1μg), The accelerometer response demonstrates excellent linearity over an acceleration range of ±25 g (1 g = 9.8 m S ⁻² ) with a scale factor of 1110 Hz/g. An in-run bias instability of 0.123 μg for a 10s integration time and a velocity random walk of 0.7μg/√Hz are recorded. The MEMS VBA has been extensively tested with measured results benchmarking favorably relative to current state-of-the-art navigation-grade MEMS accelerometers.