A triple-axis fluidic angular rate sensor

In this paper, we present the design and simulation of a microelectromechanical system (MEMS)-based fluidic angular rate sensor that is possible to simultaneously detect three components of angular rate. The sensor includes three layers in which only the layer containing in-plane hotwires requires a standard MEMS process. The other layers can be fabricated by either hot embossing or conventional machining. In the sensor, four jets comprising two perpendicular pairs of flows are generated by a piezoelectric actuator through a valveless network channel. We consider two designs to optimize the gyroscope structure with the objective function relating the output voltage to the angular rate. With the optimized sensor structure, linear variation of the output voltage with the applied angular rate is attained.