A Coriolis Vibrating Gyro Made of a Strong Piezoelectric Material

This paper presents a Coriolis vibrating gyro made of a strong piezoelectric material and designed at ONERA (The French Aerospace Lab). For many years ONERA has been developing inertial piezoelectric microsensors for vehicle attitude control and navigation (accelerometers and gyros). Despite its weak piezoelectric coefficients, quartz is used today because of its excellent mechanical and thermal properties. It has been theoretically demonstrated, that one way to enhance CVG (Coriolis vibrating gyro) resolution, is the use of a material with higher piezoelectric coefficient such as PZT ceramic. Thus the design and fabrication of a PZT gyro have been undertaken. The PZT gyro that has been developed during this work is called PZT VIG (vibrating integrated gyro). It is a monolithic CVG with a tuning fork as the sensitive element. The exciting and detecting electronics of this sensor are presented as well. First results concerning the sensor scale factor and resolution are presented and discussions are led about the comparison with theoretical expectations.