APPLICATION OF ALLAN VARIANCE METHOD FOR A 3-DOF ACCELEROMETER

Abstract

Nowadays, thanks to growth of Micro- Electro - Mechanical - System (MEMS) technology, 3-DOF accelerometers are widely applied in various kinds of applications. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of stochastic noises for a specific MEMS accelerometer. There are two kinds of noise in the MEMS-based accelerometer: deterministic and stochastic errors. The deterministic noises are usually eliminated by the carefully calibration process but the stochastic noises are always difficult to treat. We have determined successfully the characteristics of the MEMS sensors’ noise by analyzing the Power Spectrum Density (PSD) and the Allan variance of the experiment data. Combining these two methods will give us a reliable noise model to apply directly in the Noise Eliminating Block (NEB).