Abstract
Micromachined fluid inertial sensors are an important class of inertial sensors, which mainly includes thermal accelerometers and fluid gyroscopes, which have now been developed since the end of the last century for about 20 years. Compared with conventional silicon or quartz inertial sensors, the fluid inertial sensors use a fluid instead of a solid proof mass as the moving and sensitive element, and thus offer advantages of simple structures, low cost, high shock resistance, and large measurement ranges while the sensitivity and bandwidth are not competitive. Many studies and various designs have been reported in the past two decades. This review firstly introduces the working principles of fluid inertial sensors, followed by the relevant research developments. The micromachined thermal accelerometers based on thermal convection have developed maturely and become commercialized. However, the micromachined fluid gyroscopes, which are based on jet flow or thermal flow, are less mature. The key issues and technologies of the thermal accelerometers, mainly including bandwidth, temperature compensation, monolithic integration of tri-axis accelerometers and strategies for high production yields are also summarized and discussed. For the micromachined fluid gyroscopes, improving integration and sensitivity, reducing thermal errors and cross coupling errors are the issues of most concern.
Highlights
Micromachined inertial sensors have been developed for decades and are gradually becoming mature with the advancement of Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) technology
The micromachined thermal accelerometers based on thermal convection have been developed maturely and become commercialized
The micromachined fluid gyroscopes are mainly based on jet flow and thermal flow induced by thermal convection or expansion
Summary
Micromachined inertial sensors have been developed for decades and are gradually becoming mature with the advancement of Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) technology. Speaking, micromachined inertial sensors include accelerometers used for measurements of linear acceleration, velocity and position or tilt angle, shock, jerk transduction, and gyroscopes used to measure the angular rate of moving objects [1]. The fabrication processes were optimized to ensure their compatibility with the mature micromachining process All these efforts resulted in improvements of the accelerometers (such as higher sensitivity, lower noise level, higher bandwidth and lower power consumption), monolithic multiaxial sensors and better manufacturability for batch production [10,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53]. The micromachined fluid gyroscopes are less mature and still developing, more and more advances are emerging and great promotion should be achieved in the near future
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