Behavioral performance during vibration and shock for a tactical grade IMU

Sensonor has since 2009 produced tactical-grade MEMS-based IMUs and gyro-clusters. During this time, approximately 25,000 parts, containing 75,000 MEMS gyros, have been shipped. Sensonor has earlier been a supplier of high-reliable MEMS sensors, including gyros, to the demanding safety applications in the automotive industry for more than 20 years.The MEMS gyro in Sensonor's IMUs and gyro-clusters was originally designed to function in a high-vibration environment for roll-over detection in cars. Its well-proven differential Butterfly-structure with a balanced resonating element, operating in vacuum to achieve a high Q-factor, inherently provides high robustness towards vibration and shock compared to traditional FOGs and RLGs.This paper focuses on the MEMS gyros and present data prior to, during and after being exposed to several vibration profiles and shocks. The selected vibration profiles cover both steady state sinusoidal and random-vibration spectra used in the characterization of a wide variety of applications like aircrafts, smart munition and missiles. Applied shocks are in the range of 40g to 1500g. In addition to extracting key-data like VRC, time-analyses of the data are presented, covering the signals themselves and the behavior of the continuously running self-diagnostic feature implemented in the IMUs.Data is presented for 8 IMUs (24 gyros) in order to provide information about spread in the investigated properties.