A micromachined fluidic reduced inertial measurement unit using thermal expansion flow principle

This paper presents a micromachined fluidic integrated reduced inertial measurement unit based on the thermal expansion flow principle. The proposed multi-axis gas sensor can achieve the simultaneous detection of single-axis (Z-axis) angular rate and dual-axis (X-axis and Y-axis) acceleration using one chamber. To the best of the authors´ knowledge, it is the first time that such a multi-axis thermal expansion flow inertial sensor is reported. A large measurement range has been demonstrated, e.g., the Z-axis gyroscope can achieve a sensitivity of 0.548 mV/°/s with a nonlinearity less than 3.87% within the input range of ±2160 °/s.