Development of a tri-axis vortex convective gyroscope with suspended silicon thermistors

This paper reports a tri-axis vortex convective gyroscope, in which a type of suspended silicon thermistor in arch shape is proposed to reduce the thermal-induced stress, heat dissipation to the substrate. The arch structure of the thermistor reduced the thermal-induced stress up to 86% as compared with the clamped-clamped thermistor in our previous work. The experimental test results showed that sensitivities of the sensor for X-axis, Y-axis and Z-axis gyroscope were 0.642mV/°/s, 0.528mV/°/s and 0.241mV/°/s, respectively. The sensitivity improvement reached 49.65%, 56.21% and 51.57% for each axis. The measured nonlinearity for X-axis, Y-axis and Z-axis gyroscope were 2.1%, 3.8% and 4.5% in the range of ±100 °/s, respectively. An improvement of 23.53%, 36.67% and 6.25% on the linearity was obtained.