Annealing Experiments on the Quality Factor of Fused Silica Cylindrical Shell Resonator

The quality factor (Q factor) of resonators in Cylindrical Vibration Gyroscope (CVG) directly determines the drift characteristics and noise performance of the gyroscope. Annealing can reduce the residual stress and internal friction loss of materials effectively, thus increasing the Q factor significantly. In this paper, a kind of fused silica cylindrical shell resonator was presented. The design of the resonator, fabricating steps, and the annealing experiment were introduced. A laser Doppler vibrometer was utilized to measure the resonant frequency and the Q factor of resonators before and after annealing. We performed the annealing experiment on three resonators, the best results showed that after annealing, the Q factor increased by 498.3% (from 28955 to 173232, measured in 120Pa).