Advances in Valveless Piezoelectric Pump with Cone-shaped Tubes
Advances in Valveless Piezoelectric Pump with Cone-shaped Tubes
Jian-Hui Zhang 0 1 2 3
Ying Wang 0 1 2 3
Jun Huang 0 1 2 3
Valveless Cone-shaped 0 1 2 3
0 College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Guangzhou University , Guangzhou 510006 , China
1 Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51375227, 51605200) and Jiangsu Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. BK20150518)
2 Research Center of Fluid Machinery Engineering and Technology, Jiangsu University , Zhenjiang 212013 , China
3 College of Mechanical and Electrical Technology, Taizhou Polytechnic College , Taizhou 225300 , China
This paper reviews the development of valveless piezoelectric pump with cone-shaped tube chronologically, which have widely potential application in biomedicine and micro-electro-mechanical systems because of its novel principles and deduces the research direction in the future. Firstly, the history of valveless piezoelectric pumps with cone-shaped tubes is reviewed and these pumps are classified into the following types: single pump with solid structure or plane structure, and combined pump with parallel structure or series structure. Furthermore, the function of each type of cone-shaped tubes and pump structures are analyzed, and new directions of potential expansion of valveless piezoelectric pumps with cone-shaped tubes are summarized and deduced. The historical argument, which is provided by the literatures, that for a valveless piezoelectric pump with cone-shaped tubes, cone angle determines the flow resistance and the flow resistance determines the flow direction. The argument is discussed in the reviewed pumps one by one, and proved to be convincing. Finally, it is deduced that bionics is pivotal in the development of valveless piezoelectric pump with cone-shaped tubes from the perspective of evolution of biological structure. This paper summarizes the current valveless piezoelectric pumps with cone-shaped tubes and points out the future development, which may provide guidance for the research of piezoelectric actuators.
Piezoelectric pump tube; Bionics
1 Introduction
In 1993, Swedish scientists Stemme et al [1], published
the paper entitled ‘‘A valveless diffuse/nozzle-based
fluid pump’’. It marked the birth of the first non-rotary
pump without any movable valve body driven by
piezovibrators, which is invented based on the dynamic
passive valve presented by Smith [2]. The proposed pump
consists of a diffuser, a nozzle and a piezoelectric
vibrator, where the diffuser and the nozzle are mounted
below the pump chamber as inlet and outlet of pump,
and the piezoelectric vibrators are used as driving source
to generate reciprocating change of volume in pump
chamber. Along flow direction, the tube whose
crosssection broadens is defined as the diffuser tube, while
the one whose cross-section tapers off is defined as the
nozzle tube. The two aforementioned flow tubes are
collectively named cone-shaped tubes by their shape.
Hence, the valveless piezoelectric pump encompassing
these tubes is known as valveless piezoelectric pump
with cone-shaped tubes.
The appearance of the valveless piezoelectric pump
with cone-shaped tubes influences directly the
classification of pumps. The conventional volume-type
reciprocating pump is divided into the pumps using valve, but
the cone-shaped tube pump does not have any valve from
a common sense perspective. And in the definition of
non-rotary pump, the valveless concept was thus
generated. The emergence of the valveless piezoelectric pump
with cone-shaped tubes also manifests the discovery of a
novel driving source, piezoelectric vibrator, which can
convert electric energy into mechanical strain energy of
piezoelectric ceramic, and then transfer the mechanical
strain into kinetic or potential energy of fluid through
pump chamber and cone-shaped tube. This pump breaks
through the banal definition of conventional pump and
driving source, and eliminates the maladjustment between
conventional pump and new driving source, as well as
between new function and old principle [3]. It is like a
spring breeze blowing into the traditional industry of
pump. Unlike the situation in a conventional pump with
valve(s) and vibrator(s), no compromise should be made
in the valveless piezoelectric pump with cone-shaped
tubes because the cone-shaped tube with dynamic
unidirectional character matches the driving source,
piezoelectric vibrator, surprisingly well. Thanks to the facts
that the driving source matches channel and the pump
structure adapts its function, the valveless piezoelectric
pump with cone-shaped tubes becomes competitive in the
fields of bio-engineering, micro/nano manufacturing and
micro/nano driving [4–9], thus attracting much attention
of researchers. According to our retrieve data using
‘‘piezoelectric pump’’ as a key word, there are nearly
1400 papers available, of which the papers about the
valveless pump with cone-shaped tubes accounts (...truncated)