Thermo-plastically Formed Resonator Clocks for Ultra High Shock Environments

One advanced material found to survive high G-forces and also is defect and grain-size free is thermos-plastic formed (TPF) Bulk Metallic Glasses (BMG). Unlike MEMS-based silicon components which often do not survive high-G, high shock environments, Tanner Research and Yale University have successfully demonstrated thermos-plastic formed (TPF) Bulk Metallic Glass (BMG) use as an alternative materials technology that survives extreme shocks. BMG survivability has been demonstrated in the MEMS S&A device as an inertial sensing structure. The fact BMG is potentially useful as a resonator has been previously established at Tanner through the proof-of-concept accelerometer resonant structures. We propose to develop and validate the performance metrics for MEMS-style microresonators as clock sources in various BMG alloys.