Modelling of Peristaltic Pumps with Respect to Viscoelastic Tube Material Properties and Fatigue Effects

Abstract

Peristaltic pump technology is widely used wherever relatively low, highly accurately dosed volumetric flow rates are required and where fluid contamination must be excluded. Thus, typical fields of application include food, pharmaceuticals, medical technology, and analytics. In certain cases, when applied in conjunction with polymer-based tubing material, supplied peristaltic flow rates are reported to be significantly lower than the expected set flow rates. Said flow rate reductions are related to (i) the chosen tube material, (ii) tube material fatigue effects, and (iii) the applied pump frequency. This work presents a fast, dynamic, multiphysics, 1D peristaltic pump solver, which is demonstrated to capture all qualitatively relevant effects in terms of peristaltic flow rate reduction within linear peristaltic pumps. The numerical solver encompasses laminar fluid dynamics, geometric restrictions provided by peristaltic pump operation, as well as viscoelastic tube material properties and tube material fatigue effects. A variety of validation experiments were conducted within this work. The experiments point to the high degree of quantitative accuracy of the novel software and qualify it as the basis for elaborating an a priori drive correction.