This paper introduces a fiber-optic microelectromechanical system (MEMS) seismic-grade accelerometer that is fabricated by bulk silicon processing using photoresist/silicon dioxide composite masking technology. The proposed sensor is a silicon flexure accelerometer whose displacement transduction system employs a light intensity detection method based on Fabry–Perot interference (FPI). The FPI cavity is formed between the end surface of the cleaved optical fiber and the gold-surfaced sidewall of the proof mass. The proposed MEMS accelerometer is fabricated by one-step silicon deep reactive ion etching with different depths using the composite mask, among which photoresist is used as the etching-defining mask for patterning the etching area while silicon dioxide is used as the depth-defining mask. Noise evaluation experiment results reveal that the overall noise floor of the fiber-optic MEMS accelerometer is 2.4 ng/ H z at 10 Hz with a sensitivity of 3165 V/g, which is lower than that of most reported micromachined optical accelerometers, and the displacement noise floor of the optical displacement transduction system is 208 fm/ H z at 10 Hz. Therefore, the proposed MEMS accelerometer is promising for use in high-performance seismic exploration applications.

This paper presents a micromachined micro-g capacitive accelerometer with a silicon-based spring-mass sensing element. The displacement changes of the proof mass are sensed by an area-variation-based capacitive displacement transducer that is formed by the matching electrodes on both the movable proof mass die and the glass cover plate through the flip-chip packaging. In order to implement a high-performance accelerometer, several technologies are applied: the through-silicon-wafer-etching process is used to increase the weight of proof mass for lower thermal noise, connection beams are used to reduce the cross-sensitivity, and the periodic array area-variation capacitive displacement transducer is applied to increase the displacement-to-capacitance gain. The accelerometer prototype is fabricated and characterized, demonstrating a scale factor of 510 mV/g, a noise floor of 2 µg/Hz^1/2 at 100 Hz, and a bias instability of 4 µg at an averaging time of 1 s. Experimental results suggest that the proposed MEMS capacitive accelerometer is promising to be used for inertial navigation, structural health monitoring, and tilt measurement applications.

Capacitive sensing is a key technique to measure the test mass movement with a high resolution for space-borne gravitational wave detectors, such as Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and TianQin. The capacitance resolution requirement of TianQin is higher than that of LISA, as the arm length of TianQin is about 15 times shorter. In this paper, the transfer function and capacitance measurement noise of the circuit are modeled and analyzed. Figure-of-merits, including the product of the inductance L and the quality factor Q of the transformer, are proposed to optimize the transformer and the capacitance measurement resolution of the circuit. The LQ product improvement and the resonant frequency augmentation are the key factors to enhance the capacitance measurement resolution. We fabricated a transformer with a high LQ product over a wide frequency band. The evaluation showed that the transformer can generate a capacitance resolution of 0.11 aF/Hz^1/2 at a resonant frequency of 200 kHz, and the amplitude of the injection wave would be 0.6 V. This result supports the potential application of the proposed transformer in space-borne gravitational wave detection and demonstrates that it could relieve the stringent requirements for other parameters in the TianQin mission.

A high-speed interrogation scheme for large-scale fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensing arrays is presented. This technique employs parallel computing and pipeline control to modulate incident light and demodulate the reflected sensing signal. One Electro-optic modulator (EOM) and one semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) were used to generate a phase delay to filter reflected spectrum form multiple candidate FBGs with the same optical path difference (OPD). Experimental results showed that the fastest interrogation delay time for the proposed method was only about 27.2 us for a single FBG interrogation, and the system scanning period was only limited by the optical transmission delay in the sensing fiber owing to the multiple simultaneous central wavelength calculations. Furthermore, the proposed FPGA-based technique had a verified FBG wavelength demodulation stability of ±1 pm without average processing.

A method for automatic compensation of misalignment angles during matching the scale factors of two pairs of the accelerometers in developing the rotating accelerometer gravity gradient instrument (GGI) is proposed and demonstrated in this paper. The purpose of automatic scale factor matching of the four accelerometers in GGI is to suppress the common mode acceleration of the moving-based platforms. However, taking the full model equation of the accelerometer into consideration, the other two orthogonal axes which is the pendulous axis and the output axis, will also sense the common mode acceleration and reduce the suppression performance. The coefficients from the two axes to the output are δ_O and δ_P respectively, called the misalignment angles. The angle δ_O, coupling with the acceleration along the pendulous axis perpendicular to the rotational plane, will not be modulated by the rotation and gives little contribution to the scale factors matching. On the other hand, because of coupling with the acceleration along the centripetal direction in the rotating plane, the angle δ_P would produce a component with 90 degrees phase delay relative to the scale factor component. Hence, the δ_P component coincides exactly with the sensitive direction of the orthogonal accelerometers. To improve the common mode acceleration rejection, the misalignment angle δ_P is compensated by injecting a trimming current, which is proportional to the output of an orthogonal accelerometer, into the torque coil of the accelerometer during the scale factor matching. The experimental results show that the common linear acceleration suppression achieved three orders after the scale factors balance and five orders after the misalignment angles compensation, which is almost down to the noise level of the used accelerometers of 1~2 × 10⁻⁷ g/√Hz (1 g ≈ 9.8 m/s²).

Mounting requirements of a rotating accelerometer gravity gradiometer (RAGG) beyond the art of manufacture, the RAGG is susceptible to the motion of itself. Motion error is a main source of error in airborne gravity gradiometry data. This study presented a post error compensation method, which consists of post motion error compensation and post self-gradient compensation. The motion error and self-gradients are compensated before that the combination output of the four accelerometers is quadrature amplitude demodulated. The motion error compensation is based on the RAGG analytical model; motion response of the RAGG (namely motion error) is related well to the motion of the RAGG, independent of the gravitational gradient response; recording the motion status of the RAGG, with least squares regression method and the RAGG analytical model, the motion response of the RAGG are separated and removed. RAGG numerical simulation experiments results show that the post motion error compensation method is feasible, and its limit accuracy could reach 0.5 E/√ Hz.