Langatate and langasite microacoustic gyro sensors

Langasite and langatate materials are gaining in popularity for use in piezoelectric sensors because of their material properties. Both materials have similar crystal properties as the quartz crystal which is widely used in BAW applications such as resonators and a piezoelectric vibratory gyroscopes. Quartz, langasite, and langatate are trigonal class crystals belonging to the same point group 32. In this paper, we simulate and compare the gyro-characteristics of a piezoelectric doubled-ended tuning fork gyroscope using Comsol 4.2a software. Eigenfrequency analyses are performed to determine an optimal geometry of the gyroscope. Frequency response analyses are used to simulate the sensitivity of the gyroscope to angular velocity about the z-axis. The sensitivity of the quartz, langasite and langatate gyroscope are found to be 0.191 mV/(deg./s), 0.469 mV/(deg./s) and 0.784 mV/(deg./s), respectively. The results show that langasite and langatate crystal are more effective than quartz crystal for high precision piezoelectric gyroscopes.