Symmetric Differential Demodulation-Based Heterodyne Laser Interferometry Used for Wide Frequency-Band Vibration Calibration

The accelerometers are commonly applied to measure the vibrations in the fields of motion control and precision measurement, whose sensitivities are essentially important to their applications. The vibration calibration is utilized to determine their sensitivities before they are used or after a period of time. At present, the Nyquist sampling (NS), bandpass sampling (BPS), and mixer and low-pass filter sampling (MLPFS) based heterodyne laser interferometry are widely utilized to accomplish the vibration calibration. Compared with the NS method, the latter two methods can significantly reduce the sampling rate and extend the calibration frequency range. However, the BPS method has to adopt the complex algorithm and prior information so as to get its sampling rate, and the MLPFS method is inevitably influenced by an extra phase delay. In this article, a novel heterodyne laser interferometry is investigated to simultaneously determine the sensitivity magnitude and phase of the accelerometers with high accuracy in a wide frequency range. This method significantly eliminates the phase delay by introducing an appropriate symmetric differential demodulation strategy, which can improve the sensitivity phase calibration accuracy, especially at higher frequencies. The comparison experiments with the Earth's gravitation and monocular vision methods at low frequencies and the traditional MLPFS and NS methods confirm that the investigated method can calibrate the sensitivity magnitude and phase of accelerometers with the uncertainties of about 0.5% and 0.5° in the range from 0.1 Hz to 20 kHz.