Design, fabrication and experimental investigation of a planar pump using electro-conjugate fluid

Abstract

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and experimental investigation of a novel planar pump using electroconjugate fluid. The electro-conjugate fluid (ECF) is a kind of dielectric functional fluid which generates a powerful jet flow (ECF-jet) when a static electric field is applied via a pair of rod-like electrodes. This phenomenon that ECF can generate jet flows from the positive electrode to the ground electrode in an applied electric field is called the ECF effect, and converts electric energy directly into kinetic energy of the fluid. The ECF-jet acts directly on the working fluids; therefore, the proposed planar ECF pump requires no moving parts and produces no vibration or noise. The fabricated planar ECF pump consists of three parts: a pump base, a top cover, and an electrode substrate with dimensions of 280 ㎜ × 190 ㎜ × 1 ㎜. In this paper, five different electrode patterns and three different flow channel heights were investigated for the realization of a high-performance planar ECF pump. Each array of electrodes was patterned on the glass epoxy substrates using a wet-etching process, and the flow channel heights were either 200 ㎛, 300 ㎛, or 500 ㎛. The pumping experiments used FF-1 EHA2 as the working fluid. Experimentation showed that a no-load flow rate of 5.5 ㎤/s, maximum output pressure of 7.2 ㎪, and maximum output power of 11.6 ㎽ were achieved at an applied voltage of 2.0 ㎸.