Thermal compensation of gravimetric sensors using shear horizontal acoustic plate modes on quartz

Shear horizontal acoustic plate mode (SH-APM) devices have been investigated as gravimetric sensors in many applications for measurements in liquid and in gas phases. The temperature behavior has not been examined in those applications. Thermal effects appear as parasitic and as an important limiting factor of the ultimate sensitivity of SH-APM sensors. In this paper, temperature sensitivity is modelled and tested experimentally on singly-rotated quartz plates. The IDT are deposited perpendicularly to the X-axis of the quartz crystal. The results show that the thermal sensitivity depends on the crystal anisotropy, the ratio of thickness to wavelength and the order of the SH-mode. New possibilities for multicompensation of thermal effects have been found. The proper choice of the operating mode by an external circuit allows to select a proper range of temperature without changing the crystal cut, which is the case for a conventional Rayleigh wave