A high performance planar pump using electro-conjugate fluid with improved electrode patterns

Abstract

A high performance planar pump using electro-conjugate fluid (ECF) with improved electrode patterns was proposed, fabricated, and tested. The ECF is a kind of dielectric and functional fluids, which generates a powerful jet flow (ECF-jet) by an applied static electric field through a pair of electrodes. The ECF-jet directly acts on the working fluids, thus, the planar ECF pump which we have proposed needs no moving parts and produces no vibration and noise. The planar ECF pump consists of three parts: a pump base, a top cover, and an electrode substrate. In this paper, various array of electrode patterns were investigated for realization of a high performance planar ECF pump. The electrode patterns include five different electrode pairs, such as the pairs of rectangular electrodes with stage (a pair of electrodes) distance, saw-tooth/rectangular electrodes with stage distance, saw-tooth/arc-shape electrodes with stage distance, 300 μm pitch saw-tooth/arc-shape electrode with same electrode distance, and 200 μm pitch saw-tooth/arc-shape electrode with same electrode distance. Each array of electrodes was patterned on the glass epoxy substrates using wet-etching process. The overall dimensions of the fabricated planar ECF pump are 120 mm × 38 mm × 13 mm and the flow channel height is 500 μm. The pumping experiments of the fabricated planar ECF pump were performed with five different electrode patterns using FF-1 EHA2 as the working fluid. Through experimental results, the no-load flow rate of 940 mm 3/s, maximum output pressure of 11.6 kPa, and maximum output power of 3.1 mW were achieved at an applied voltage of 3.0 kV.