Analysis and design of thermo-sensitive quartz tuning fork resonators for temperature sensors

This paper describes a novel quartz tuning fork temperature sensor, the principle of the quartz tuning fork temperature sensor is to detect resonance frequency shift by an external temperature. It has such advantages: high sensitivity, high accuracy, and good long-term stability. The temperature sensor is prepared of synthetic quartz on ZY-cut plates and configured by ZY-Cut quartz crystal wafer based tuning fork resonators whose operating frequency is at about 31 KHz. The characterization of a flexural mode tuning fork resonator which inherent frequency is sensitive to temperature changes is presented. Finite element method has been used in the deign process. The temperature frequency characteristic test system is setup. The temperature sensor is used to measure temperature in the range -50 Degree C-140 Degree C. The measurement results show that the tuning fork resonators based temperature sensor exhibits excellent sensitivity and short-term repeatability.