Design and Modification of a High-Resolution Optical Interferometer Accelerometer

Yuan Yao; Debin Pan; Jianbo Wang; Tingting Dong; Jie Guo; Chensheng Wang; Anbing Geng; Weidong Fang; Qianbo Lu

doi:10.3390/s21062070

Design and Modification of a High-Resolution Optical Interferometer Accelerometer

Sensors (Basel). 2021 Mar 16;21(6):2070. doi: 10.3390/s21062070.

Authors

Yuan Yao^{1

2}, Debin Pan^{1

2}, Jianbo Wang², Tingting Dong², Jie Guo², Chensheng Wang², Anbing Geng², Weidong Fang³, Qianbo Lu⁴

Affiliations

¹ Wuhan National Lab for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
² Wuhan National Lab for Optoelectronics, Huazhong Institute of Electro-Optics, Wuhan 430223, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation, Department of Optical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
⁴ Frontiers Science Center for Flexible Electronics (FSCFE), MIIT Key Laboratory of Flexible Electronics (KLoFE), Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Flexible Electronics (KLoFE), Institute of Flexible Electronics (IFE), Ningbo Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, China.

Abstract

The Micro-Opto-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MOEMS) accelerometer is a new type of accelerometer that combines the merits of optical measurement and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) to enable high precision, small volume, and anti-electromagnetism disturbance measurement of acceleration, which makes it a promising candidate for inertial navigation and seismic monitoring. This paper proposes a modified micro-grating-based accelerometer and introduces a new design method to characterize the grating interferometer. A MEMS sensor chip with high sensitivity was designed and fabricated, and the processing circuit was modified. The micro-grating interference measurement system was modeled, and the response sensitivity was analyzed. The accelerometer was then built and benchmarked with a commercial seismometer in detail. Compared to the previous prototype in the experiment, the results indicate that the noise floor has an ultra-low self-noise of 15 ng/Hz^1/2.

Keywords: MOEMS accelerometer; diffraction gratings; interferometry; low-g accelerometer.