Impact of outgassing and its corrective methods to improve the vacuum stability in the Coriolis Vibratory Gyroscope

Coriolis Vibratory Gyroscope (CVG) is an inertial angular rate measurement sensor. CVG sensor comprises of metal coated hemispherical quartz vibrating structure as the rotation sensing element. It is forced to vibrate at one of its resonant modes by electrostatic excitation. Because of the limited flexibility of the quartz sensing element, the amplitude is limited to the submicron level. An ultra-high vacuum environment is required for the sensing element to sustain vibration for a long time. The criticality in the sensor development is to maintaining an ultra-high vacuum environment for the sensing element. Sensor suffers a problem of vacuum instability during the operation due to the outgassing from its components. This paper presents a novel approach in the identification of various outgassing sources that exist in the sensor, mitigation plan to minimize outgassing rate by selection of suitable raw material, suitable fabrication process of the components, and the surface characterization etc. The research work also presents the cost-effective experimental methodology to measure the outgassing rate from the sensor components to assess the CVG vacuum life, the requirement of the getter to maintain the ultra-high vacuum level throughout the CVG operation.