Temperature-compensated SH-APM sensors: new theoretical and experimental results

Our aim is to study acoustic wave devices for sensing applications in gas or liquid media. Compared to surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices, shear horizontal acoustic plate mode (SH-APM) devices are based on thin piezoelectric plates, so that a great number of stationary waves, or plate modes, can propagate. SH-APM devices present two main advantages. Firstly, they are able to work in a liquid medium without excessive acoustic loss. Secondly, they can work in an aggressive medium, by using the unmetallized quartz surface for detection. As temperature variation is a critical parameter, it is important to know the device behaviour with temperature. This was already achieved for SAW devices, and it has been done partially for SH-APM devices. In this paper, we propose to recall main theoretical results, and to use the model approach to study particular SH-APM devices, from a theoretical and an experimental point of view