Theoretical Analysis and Experimental Verification on Flow Field of Piezoelectric Pump with Unsymmetrical Slopes Element

摘要

Regular valveless piezoelectric pumps have rectifying elements outside their chambers to produce net flow.These rectifying elements outside the chamber will increase the overall volume of the pump and prevent its minimization.Valveless piezoelectric pump with unsymmetrical slopes elements(USE),proposed in this paper,differs from other valveless pumps in that it is easy to be minimized by developing the chamber bottom as such a rectifying element.In this research,the working principle of the proposed pump was analyzed first.Numerical models were thereby established and numerical simulation was conducted to the chamber flow field with the method of time-dependent velocity.The effects of the USEs on the flow field in the chamber were shown clearly in simulation.And the particular feature of flow field in the chamber was discovered.It behaves a complex flow field,in which strong turbulent occurs companying a lot of vortexes in different directions and different sizes.This feature is just opposite to what regular piezoelectric pumps expect:a moderate flow field.The turbulent flow could be used to have different liquids stirred and well mixed in the chamber to produce homogeneous solution,emulsion or turbid liquid.Meanwhile,numerical simulation also presents the effect of the angles difference of the two slopes upon the flow field,and upon the flow rate of the pump,which fits to the theoretical analysis.Experiments with the proposed pump were also conducted to verify the numerical results.In these experiments,six USEs with different slope angles were used for efficiency tests,which proved the validity and reliability of the numerical analysis.The data obtained from numerical analysis agree well with that from the experiments.The errors ranged from 4.4% to 14.8% with their weighted average error being 9.7%.