Calibration of triaxial accelerometers by constant rotation rate in the gravitational field.

We extend the use of the intrinsic properties calibration method for triaxial accelerometers that we reported previously from discrete angular steps to using a constant rotation rate to produce a time varying sinusoidal excitation in the earth's gravitational field. We show that this extension yields the low frequency calibration response of the device under test. Whereas traditional vibration-based methods using shakers generally exhibit an increased measurement uncertainty with decreased excitation frequency, we show that this approach does not. We report results obtained from a commercial triaxial digital accelerometer from DC up to a 0.5 Hz rotation rate. The maximum rotation rate that we report is limited by our rotation stage; but we expect that the method can be extended to higher rotation rates with an upper limit constrained by what can be tolerated as a maximum centripetal acceleration.