Navigation-grade interferometric air-core antiresonant fibre optic gyroscope with enhanced thermal stability

TL;DR

This paper introduces a navigation-grade air-core fibre optic gyroscope with enhanced thermal stability, achieving high precision and low environmental sensitivity, marking a significant advancement in inertial navigation technology.

Contribution

The study demonstrates a novel air-core FOG with state-of-the-art antiresonant fibre, achieving navigation-grade performance and superior thermal stability compared to conventional solid-core FOGs.

Findings

Achieved an angular random walk of 0.0038 deg h-1/2.

Bias-stability drift over 8500 s of 0.0014 deg h-1.

Thermal sensitivity reduced by approximately 6-10 times.

Abstract

We present a groundbreaking navigation-grade interferometric air-core fibre optic gyroscope (IFOG) using a quadrupolar-wound coil of four-tube truncated double nested antiresonant nodeless fibre (tDNANF). This state-of-the-art tDNANF simultaneously achieves low loss, low bend loss, single-spatial-mode operation, and exceptional linear polarization purity over a broad wavelength range. Our 469 m tDNANF coil demonstrated a polarization extinction ratio (PER) of ~20 dB when illuminated by an amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) source spanning 1525-1565 nm. Under these conditions, the gyro archives an angular random walk (ARW) of 0.0038 deg h-1/2 and a bias-stability (BS) drift over 8500 s of 0.0014 deg h-1, marking the first instance of navigation-grade performance in air-core FOGs. Additionally, we validated the low thermal sensitivity of air-core FOGs, with reductions of 9.24/10.68/6.82 compared to that of conventional polarization-maintaining solid-core FOGs of the same size across various temperature ranges. These results represent a significant step towards long-standing promise of high-precision inertial navigation applications with superior environmental adaptability.