Identification of Vibration Modes of Quartz Crystal Plates with Proportion of Strain and Kinetic Energies

Abstract

For the design of quartz crystal resonators, finding and determining the vibration modes have always been very important and cumbersome. Vibration modes are usually identified through plotting displacement patterns of each coupled modes and making comparisons. Over the years, there is not much improvement in the identification procedure while tremendous efforts have been made in refining the equations of the Mindlin plate theory to obtain more accurate results, such as the adoption of the Finite Element Method (FEM) by implementing the high-order Mindlin plate equations for efficient analysis. However, due to the old fashioned mode identification method, the FEM application is still inadequate and cannot be fully automated for this purpose. To have this situation improved, a method using the proportions of strain and kinetic energies to characterize the energy level of each vibration mode is proposed. With solutions of displacements, the energy distribution of each vibration mode is calculated and the mode with the highest energy concentration at a specific frequency is designated as the dominant mode. The results have been validated with the traditional approach by plotting mode shapes at each frequency. Clearly, this energy approach will be advantageous with the FEM analysis for vibration mode identification automatically.