Integrated thin film resistive sensors for in situ temperature measurements in an acoustic trap

This work presents an acoustic trap with integrated thin film sensors to monitor temperature variations during operation. The acoustic trap is wet-etched in glass with a thermally bonded glass lid and the thin-film sensors are integrated during fabrication. We evaluated the performance of the integrated temperature sensors and measured a temperature sensitivity of +/- 0.01 degrees C and confirmed that the read-out of the thin film sensors was not affected neither by the ionic conductivity of the solution nor the addition of microparticles into the acoustic trap. From the experiments we observed a temperature increase of the acoustic trap during operation as a result of the dissipative heating of the the piezoelectric element used to actuate the trap. We also showed that when external convective cooling was applied to the system, the temperature increase of the acoustic trap was higher than the temperature increase of the piezoelectric element itself. This shows the importance of using integrated temperature sensors in acoustic trapping to monitor the local environmental conditions.