Surface acoustic wave oscillator

Chemical sensors have been reported that are based on quartz micro balances or surface acoustic wave oscillators coated with the trimethylsilyl ethers of and 6 " and that are claimed to detect various solvent vapors in ppm amounts. ... 

Penza, M., Antolini,F. and Vittori-Antisari, M. (2005), Carbon nanotubes-based surface acoustic waves oscillating sensor for vapour detection Thin Solid Films, 472,246-52. 

Selective Measurement of Vinyl Acetate Vapor Using a Coated Surface Acoustic Wave Oscillator... 

Surface Acoustic Waves (SA Ws). The basic idea of this technique is to use the dependence of the frequency and propagation of surface acoustic waves on mass loading in a film. The porous film has to be deposited on a piezoelectric substrate (quartz), which is then placed into a physisorption setup to condense nitrogen at 77 K. Adsorption and condensation of N2 result in a shift of the oscillation frequency, and thus measurements of the oscillation frequency as a function of N2 partial pressure provide an adsorption-desorption isotherm.30 Although the technique has proven to provide a concise characterization of porous films,29,30 the requirement for the deposition directly onto the SAW piezoelectric substrate represents a certain restriction. 

Surface acoustic-wave (SAW) elements Plate-mode oscillators Interface impedance elements Fiber optic elements sensitive to elastic constants... 

Fig. 21. A surface acoustic wave dual-delay line oscillator. The sensitise layer is placed in the propagation path of one of the two SAW devices. The differenee in Ireqnency (At) between the two channels provides a dtrecl result of the mass loading and electric field effects associated w ith the sensor layer...

The addition of mass provides the means of transduction for many chemical sensors, including surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices, quartz crystal microbalances (QCM), and microcantilevers. In all these devices, the mass addition either perturbs the vibration, oscillations, or deflection within the transducer. The mode of transduction in an optical interferometer can also be linked to mass addition the sensor s response is altered by refractive index changes in the material being monitored. It is possible that this change can be elicited solely from refractive index changes without the addition of mass, although in sensing a particular... 

The most commonly known oscillator sensors are bulk acoustic wave (BAW) and surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices. The BAW devices operate according to the Sauerbrey principle that very thin films on AT-cut crystals can be treated as equivalent mass changes of the crystal. The SAW devices can operate either on the Rayleigh wave propagation principle at solid thin-film boundaries [3] or as bulk wave devices [4]. 

Microcantilever sensors offer many orders of magnitude better sensitivity compared to other sensors such as quartz crystal microbalances (QCM), flexural plate wave oscillators (FPW), and surface acoustic wave devices (SAW). There are several distinct advantages of the microcantilever sensors compared to the above mentioned and other MEMS sensors ... 

Figure 2. Surface acoustic wave gas sensor consisting of dual delay line oscillator[4].

Perturbations of the medium adjacent to the device surface result in variations in the phase, amplitude, and velocity of the surface acoustic wave. Specifically, these properties will be affected by changes in the density, viscosity, or elastic properties of the medium in contact with the surface. Since the acoustic wave has an electric potential wave associated with it as well, the SAW can also be used to probe the dielectric and conductive properties of this surface medium. By far, the largest number of chemical sensor applications of SAW devices take advantage of the mass sensitivity of SAW oscillators. 

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