Analysis of Parametric and Subharmonic Excitation in Push-Pull Driven Disk Resonator Gyroscopes

For micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) resonators, once the devices are fabricated and packaged, their intrinsic quality factors (Q) will be fixed and cannot be changed, which seriously limits the further improvement of the resonator’s performance. In this paper, parametric excitation is applied in a push-pull driven disk resonator gyroscope (DRG) to improve its sensitivity by an electrical pump, causing an arbitrary increase of the “effective Q”. However, due to the differential characteristics of the push-pull driving method, the traditional parametric excitation method is not applicable. As a result, two novel methods are proposed and experimentally carried out to achieve parametric excitation in the push-pull driven DRGs, resulting in a maximum “effective Q” of 2.24 × 106 in the experiment, about a 7.6 times improvement over the intrinsic Q. Besides, subharmonic excitation is also theoretically analyzed and experimentally characterized. The stability boundary of parametric excitation, defined by a threshold voltage, is theoretically predicted and verified by related experiments. It is demonstrated that, when keeping the gyroscope’s vibration at a constant amplitude, the fundamental frequency driving voltage will decrease with the increasing of the parametric voltage and will drop to zero at its threshold value. In this case, the gyroscope operates in a generalized parametric resonance condition, which is called subharmonic excitation. The novel parametric and subharmonic excitation theories displayed in this paper are proven to be efficient and tunable dynamical methods with great potential for adjusting the quality factor flexibly, which can be used to further enhance the resonator’s performance.

Approximate Super- and Sub-harmonic Response of a Multi-DOFs System with Local Cubic Nonlinearities under Resonance

A multi-degree-of-freedom dynamical system with local cubic nonlinearities subjected to super/subharmonic excitation is considered in this paper. The purpose of this paper is to approximate the nonlinear response of system at super/sub harmonic resonance. For many situations, single resonance mode is often observed to be leading as system enters into super/sub harmonic resonance. In this case, the single modal natural resonance theory can be applied to reduce the system model and a simplified model with only a single DOF is always obtained. Thus, an approximate solution and the analytical expression of frequency response relation are then derived using classical perturbation analysis. While the system is controlled by multiple modes, modal analysis for linearized system is used to decide dominant modes. The reduced model governed by these relevant modes is found and results in an approximate numerical solutions. An illustrative example of the discrete mass-spring-damper nonlinear vibration system with ten DOFs is examined. The approximation results are validated by comparing them with the calculations from direct numerical integration of the equation of motion of the original nonlinear system. Comparably good agreements are obtained.

A Study of Subharmonic Excitation of Mechanically Coupled Microbeams for Filtration

We study the feasibility of employing subharmonic resonance of order one-half to create a bandpass filter using two clamped-clamped microbeam resonators connected by a weak coupling beam. We discretize the distributed-parameter system using the Galerkin procedure to obtain a reduced-order model composed of two nonlinear coupled ODEs. It accounts for geometric and electric nonlinearities as well as the coupling between these two fields. Using the method of multiple scales, we determine four first-order nonlinear ODEs describing the amplitudes and phases of the modes. We use these equations to determine closed-form expressions for the static and dynamic deflections of the structure. The basis functions in the discretization are the linear undamped global mode shapes of the unactuated structure. We found that we can not produce a single-valued response for small excitation amplitudes. So that, it is impractical to use a single structure made of two mechanically coupled beams excited subharmonically in filtration. But we can use a pair of structures to build a bandpass filter by operating one in the softening domain and the other in the hardening domain and, more importantly, implementing processing logic and hardware schemes. However, the complications brought about by mechanically coupling of two microbeams can be avoided by using a pair of uncoupled beams. This makes the fabrication and modeling processes much easier. Using subharmonic excitation with mechanically uncoupled microbeams to realize bandpass filters is the subject of the next work.