Particle Imaging Velocimetry Gyroscope Design Fabrication and Validation
Creators: name: Youssef, Ahmed A. H.
Publisher: name: Schulich School of Engineering
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Angular Rate Sensors
subject: Fluid-based Inertial Sensors
subject: Gyroscope
subject: Inertial Measurement Units
subject: Particle Imaging Velocimetry
subject: Particle Tracking Velocimetry
subject: Computational Fluid Dynamics
subject: Dynamical Sensor Modelling
subject: Engineering--General
subject: Engineering--Industrial
subject: Engineering--Automotive
subject: Engineering--Electronics and Electrical
subject: Engineering--Mechanical
subject: Engineering--Civil

description: Inertial navigation represents a unique method of navigation in which there is no dependency on external sources of information. As opposed to other Position-fixing navigation techniques, inertial navigation performs the navigation in a relative sense with respect to the initial position of the body. Hence, inertial navigation systems are not prone to jamming or spoofing. Inertial navigation systems have developed vastly, from their occurrence in the 1940s up to date. The accuracy of the inertial sensors has improved over time, making inertial sensors sufficient in terms of size, weight, poser, cost, and accuracy for navigation and guidance applications. In the past few years, inertial sensors have developed from being purely mechanical into incorporating various technologies and taking advantage of numerous physical phenomena. The dynamic forces exerted on a moving body could be computed accurately. Besides, the evolution of the inertial navigation scheme involved the shift from the stable-platform inertial navigation systems, which were mechanically complicated, to computationally demanding strap-down inertial navigation systems. Optical sensory technologies have provided highly accurate inertial sensors at smaller sizes. Besides, the vibratory inertial navigation technologies enabled the production of Micro-electro-machined inertial sensors that are very low-cost. Micromachined inertial sensors offer small size, weight and low power consumption, making them suitable for a wide range of day-to-day navigation applications. On another note, inertial sensor errors constitute a huge research aspect. It is intended for inertial sensors to reach a level in which they could operate for substantially long operation times in the absence of updates from aiding sensors, which would be a giant leap.Consequently, this thesis introduces a proposition of a novel fluid-based gyroscope, which is referred to hereafter as Particle Imaging Velocimetry Gyroscope (PIVG). The PIVG gyroscope is advantageous in being nearly drift-free, with a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in comparison to commercially available high-end gyroscopes, achieved at low cost.A conceptual design for the PIVG has been devised, which included identifying the underlying sensor technology, principal components, and sensor assembly. An initial prototype has been developed to provide a proof of concept for the sensor operation. Besides, the dynamical sensor model has been derived through physical modelling, providing a direct relationship between the measured fluid flow velocity within the sensor and the input angular velocity. The derived model has high fidelity. Furthermore, the domain of validity of the sensor has been achieved based on the sensor model.Additionally, and a criterion for the sensor dimensioning and design has been developed. Furthermore, a high accuracy solution to the sensor-dynamical model, a second-order non-homogeneous partial differential equation, has been derived. The acquired sensor solution has been validated on a series of simulated data sets to retrieve the angular velocity to which the sensor was subjected. The derived sensor model solution successfully determined the angular momentum imparted to the sensor with a maximum relative error of 3 % for the simulated datasets.Afterwards, the sensor design was optimized. A prototype was fabricated based on the conclusions from the sensor modelling process and the available design criteria of PIV systems within the literature. The PIVG prototype was tested in a controlled laboratory experiment to determine its actual transient response and long-term error behaviour. The experimental laboratory results showed that the PIVG prototype endured a root mean square error of 0.33 °/s in angular velocity compared to the reference dataset. Besides, the sensor reported an angular velocity error of 0.2°/s at the end of the laboratory experiment duration, which was almost 20 minutes.Nonetheless, the limitations and drawbacks of the PIVG prototype have been identified. The true PIVG potential was tested in a real navigation scenario for the navigation of a car within an urban environment. The PIVG performance was consistent, which reported an RMSE of approximately 1.25 °/s over two experiments. However, the sensor performance in the real navigation scenario was degraded because of the limited fabrication quality and lack of proper sensor error modelling. Hence, the sensor would achieve high-end performance at low-cost, if the sensor prototype would be reiterated in terms of the fabrication quality and sensor calibration.