Design and fabrication of a vortex inertial sensor consisting of 3-DOF gyroscope and 3-DOF accelerometer

This paper reports a novel vortex multi-axis inertial sensor, which can detect three components of angular rate and three components of linear acceleration simultaneously. It uses a vortex gas flow instead of the traditional linear gas flow as the inertial mass to detect the angular rate and linear acceleration. In the implementation, the vortex was formed by jetting the gas into a round chamber through two opposing nozzle orifices in the opposite direction. And the multi-axis detection was realized by a proper configuration of thermistors. The test results show that both the gyroscopes and accelerometers can reach a medium accuracy, which proves the feasibility of the device.