ABSTRACT
A new analytical formulation for phase noise in MEMS oscillators was recently presented encompassing the role of essential nonlinearities in the electrical and mechanical domains. In this paper, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed analytical formulation with respect to the unified theory developed by Demir et al. describing phase noise in oscillators. In particular, it is shown that, over a range of the second-order mechanical nonlinear stiffness of the MEMS resonator, both models exhibit an excellent match in the phase diffusion coefficient calculation for a square-wave MEMS oscillator.
ABSTRACT
A bulk acoustic mode micro-electro-mechanical dual resonator platform is utilised to study the evaporation of sub-microliter water droplets from the surface of the resonator. An analytical formulation for the observed frequency shift and the measure dependence of resonant frequency on the modes of evaporation which is consistent with the optically derived data. The resonators access only a thin layer of the liquid through shear contact and, hence, the response is not affected by the bulk mass of the droplet to first order. A relationship between the droplet contact area and the elapsed time was established for the evaporation process and is used to derive a value of the diffusion coefficient of water in air that is found to be in reasonable agreement with literature values. This work introduces a new tool for the electro-mechanical monitoring of droplet evaporation with relevance to applications such as biosensing in liquid samples of sub-microliter volumes.
