Abstract

This paper presents an 8-fold reduction of thermal sensitivity of a navigation grade fiber optic gyroscope (FOG) coil. We used an advanced thermal modeling of a fiber optic gyroscope coil to obtain the strain fields along the coil and calculate the rate error. Strain field calculations are validated by optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) measurements of a laboratory fiber optic gyroscope setup. We separated the strain analysis into axial and radial gradients along the fiber coil. We designed a new fiber coil with reduced axial strain sensitivity and run simulations to calculate its strain coefficients and the rate error. Simulations show more than 8-fold reduction in rate error along with experimental results which show nearly 4-fold reduction.

© 2018 The Author(s)