Concept of a liquid rate gyroscope using an electro-conjugate fluid

We propose a novel liquid rate gyroscope using an electro-conjugate fluid in this study. The electro-conjugate fluid (ECF) is a dielectric fluid that works here as a functional/smart fluid generating a powerful jet flow (ECF jet) when subjected to high DC voltage. Using the ECF jet, we developed a liquid rate gyroscope based on the principle of a conventional gas rate sensor operated by Coriolis force. Because the ECF jet is generated only with a tiny electrode pair, the pumping part of proposed ECF gyroscope needs no mechanically moving parts, resulting in making the ECF gyroscope suitable for micro sensor compared to the gas rate sensor having a pumping mechanism inside. We fabricated a prototype of liquid rate gyroscope (40 mm times 60 mm times t7 mm) and confirmed its characteristics by experiment. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed liquid rate gyroscope. The scale factor of -29 mV/(deg/s) is obtained with applied voltage of 4.5 kV.