Experimental and numerical investigations of mechanical displacements in surface acoustic wave bounded beams

Abstract The present paper studies experimentally and numerically the surface acoustic wave (SAW) field on a piezoelectric substrate generated by interdigital transducers (IDT). On the one hand, mechanical displacements produced by the SAW are measured with the help of a laser Doppler vibrometer. On the other hand, mechanical displacements are computed by the two-dimensionalfinite element method in frequency domain followed by the spatial Fourier transform. Combining these two steps of computations results in the intended two-dimensional distribution of mechanical displacements on the substrate surface. The comparison of experimental and numerical data obtained for a series of different IDTs reveals that it is possible to estimate the shape of the SAW beam and the absolute value of mechanical displacement amplitude using only the basic parameters of the IDT and its electrical admittance measured by a network analyzer.