Odor detection plays an irreplaceable role in food safety, environmental monitoring, medical treatment and disease diagnosis. The traditional artificial electronic nose can be used to some extent, but its performance is far inferior to the biological olfactory field in many aspects, for instance, detection range, response rate, specificity, etc. Three kinds of waves propagate on surface acoustic wave (SAW) device. They are longitudinal wave, Rayleigh waves and leaky Rayleigh wave. We also pay attention the SAW in a SAW device in with ethanol, Cp-Lip1 odorant binding protein and 5 odorant molecules are used as liquid media. Then, we compare between the theoretical and experimental velocities to verify the effectiveness of the SAW device. The results of surface acoustic wave propagation velocity of odorant binding proteins and odorant molecules show that some odorant molecules can be recognized by surface acoustic wave devices using odorant binding proteins.