INERTIAL GRADE LASER ACCELEROMETER-PRACTICABILITY AND BASIC EXPERIMENTS

Wolfgang Holzapfel, Nejat Mahdavi, Martin Suske

Abstract

A novel laser accelerometer is introduced, its physical principle and main characteristics are explained, and preliminary experimental results are presented. The accelerometer utilizes two Nd:YAG laser crystals and a common proof mass which operate in push-pull mode. The main advantages of the described laser accelerometer are wide measuring range which covers 9 decades up to 100 m/s², very high linearity over measuring range and excellent dynamics (20 kHz bandwidth). In comparison to servo accelerometers, these results represent a high-performance sensor. The measurement uncertainty and precision analysis have been carried out according to GUM guidelines. The analysis shows that the relative uncertainty
in sensitivity of the laser accelerometer amounts to 10^-6.

Keywords

Inertial Navigation, Photoelastic Effect, Laser Accelerometer

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PWC-2003-TC2-003.pdf

DOI

-

IMEKO TC

TC2 - Photonics

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