Planar coil excitation of multifrequency shear wave transducers

A transducer format that replaces the electrode of an acoustic resonator with a planar spiral coil is used to extract multifrequency spectral information from adsorbed protein films. Both amorphous silica and crystalline piezoelectric resonators are driven to resonance by forces induced across an air gap by magnetic direct generation and piezoelectric excitation induced by the electromagnetic field of the coil. Inspection of the harmonic frequencies between 6 MHz and 0.6 GHz indicates that the response of these two resonator types is described by different families of shear acoustic standing waves, with similar acoustic features to the quartz crystal microbalance. Exposure of the devices to protein solutions results in reproducible shifts of their harmonic frequencies, up to a maximum of 15 kHz and increasing linearly with frequency and operating mode. The gradient, determined from the ratio of the frequency change to the operating frequency was determined as 21.5 × 10-6 for the quartz device and 60.9 × 10-6 for the silica device. Consistency with the Sauerbrey equation for the piezoelectric linear shear mode was comparable at a predicted value of 22.5 × 10-6, but not for the radial shear mode of the silica device at 12.7 × 10-6. Opportunities resulting from the wide bandwidth of the planar coil excitation and choice of acoustic mode are discussed with respect to acoustic fingerprinting of adsorbed proteins. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved