Design of Quartz Tuning Fork Sensor for Environmental Temperature Control

Quartz crystal is an elastomer with a natural oscillation frequency which can be served as a temperature sensor based on the resonance and thermal sensitivity subject to temperature when the forced vibration frequency is equal to its natural frequency. As a new type of temperature sensor, quartz crystal temperature sensor possesses high resolution, exact linearity and remarkable stability which could be used to measure temperature applied to moderate and low temperature environments. It is widely adopted in temperature measuring instruments under the circumstance of high-precision environments due to its availability of converting temperature signals to digital frequency signals. The oscillation frequency of the quartz fork resonator is extremely sensitive to the mass and stiffness of the quartz fork arm. Because of the electrode trench which can reflect the ambient temperature changes, it would be of special interest to design a temperature-sensitive quartz fork resonator for the study. The overall goal of this research is to study the surface electrode and quartz tuning fork temperature sensor in light of proposing an approach of temperature sensor design methodology, completing the sensor characteristic simulation, and designing the corresponding size of the sensor structure. Specific structure size: fork thickness 0.13mm, fork arm length 3mm, fork arm width 0.27mm, total length 5mm, total width 0.8mm.