EFFECT OF IMPERFECTIONS ON FUSED SILICA SHELL RESONATORS

Axisymmetric shell resonators have been attractive candidates for high performance MEMS vibratory gyroscopes because of their high quality factor, low sensitivity to environmental vibrations and electrostatic tuning capability. Fused silica shell resonators made by blow torch molding with high quality factor could perform as high performance MEMS gyroscopes. Despite such advantageous features, the performance of these shell resonators is limited by geometric imperfections that occur during fabrication. This paper investigates effect of geometric asymmetries such as height and radius imperfections, notch, and mass imbalance in the rim of gyroscopes on the split in natural frequencies of the n=2 wineglass modes. Numerical simulation shows that perfect fused silica shell has 13929 Hz natural resonance frequencies without any frequency split. Analysis of imperfect shell reveals that frequency split is very sensitive to edge geometric imperfection and mass imbalance in the rim. On the other hand, Delta f is not very sensitive to the notch in the rim of shell and height imperfection less than 40 mu m.