Elastic, Piezoelectric Coefficients, and Internal Frictions of a Single Alpha-Quartz Crystal Determined by Partial-Electrode Electromechanical Impedance Spectroscopy

In this work, all independent elastic coefficients, piezoelectric coefficients, and internal frictions of a single alpha-quartz crystal are determined at room temperature using our recently proposed partial-electrode electromechanical impedance spectroscopy (PE-EMIS). In PE-EMIS, the rectangular parallelepiped quartz sample with two small partial electrodes fabricated on a corner is self-excited/sensed. The conductance spectrum (equivalent to the acoustic resonance spectrum) measured by an impedance analyzer under a free boundary condition is noiseless, allowing the first 100 eigenmodes ranging from 50 to 310 kHz to be accurately fit. To avoid mode misidentification, the off-plane displacement distributions of the quartz sample under different eigenmodes are determined using a scanned-laser vibrometer. The resonance spectrum measured by a traditional sandwich-like resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS) apparatus is also presented for comparison, and the results show that the clamping force in sandwich-like RUS shifts the sample’s resonance frequencies, causing 13% and 75% overestimations for the piezoelectric coefficients e11 and e14, respectively. In comparison with the RUS, our proposed PE-EMIS is more effective and convenient and will be widely used for characterization of piezoelectric crystals.