Monitoring of biofilm growth with thickness-shear mode quartz resonators in different flow and nutrition conditions

Monitoring of microbial biofilm growth with 10 MHz thickness-shear mode (TSM) resonators in aqueous systems with different fluid flow speed and nutrition environments was studied. Biofilm grew even on a polished gold surface of the resonator. Admittance magnitude of the resonator was found to be a robust electrical quantity to monitor, since the pressure shocks generated by the fluid pumps seem to add considerable noise only to resonance frequency. Microbial biofilm growth has not been earlier reported as a function of admittance magnitude of a TSM resonator.