MicroSystems Lab wins Outstanding Paper Award at Transducers’ 11 Conference

Samueli School lab wins honor for paper

The Henry Samuel School of Engineering’s MicroSystems Lab in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering was awarded an Outstanding Paper Award at The 16th International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems in Beijing, China.

The paper, entitled “Sub-Degree-per-Hour Silicon MEMS Rate Sensor with 1 Million Q-Factor,” was authored by Igor P. Prikhodko, a Samueli School Ph.D. student; Dr. Sergei A. Zotov, a postdoctoral fellow; Dr. Alexander A. Trusov, a project scientist and principal investigator of the project; and Professor Andrei M. Shkel, Ph.D., the director of the MicroSystems Lab.



The paper reports a new silicon micromachined sensor of rotation, called Quad Mass Gyroscope (QMG). The unique properties of the QMG inertial transducer are the complete structural symmetry and very low dissipation of energy due to the intricate mechanical design and robust vacuum packaging. The gyroscope has a demonstrated ability to interchangeably operate in both precision rate (low noise) and whole angle (wide range) modes of operation. The Transducers Conference paper focuses on the potential application of the micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) sensor to gyrocompassing (azimuth seeking). By rotating the gyroscope's sensitive axis in a horizontal plane, projections of the earth's rate are measured allowing the identification of true north. The initial experimental results and analysis of this challenging project illustrate the feasibility of the MEMS rate sensor for non-magnetic azimuth sensing systems, previously limited to macro-scale mechanical and laser gyroscopes. This work has been supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD).



 Link to the paper: http://mems.eng.uci.edu/publications/2011-trusov-transducers-QMG.pdf