A design of a miniature ultrasonic pump using a bending disk transducer

Abstract

If a pipe end is faced at a piston-vibrating surface with a small gap in liquid, the liquid is suctioned into the pipe. The present ultrasonic pump is based on this phenomenon to induce flow. For a low-profile configuration, we introduce a 30-mm-diameter bending disk driven by a ring-shaped PZT element bonded on the back of the disk. The disk vibrator is softly supported by frames via O-rings at its circumference, and is worked at the fundamental resonance frequency of 19 kHz of the bending mode. A pipe is installed perpendicularly to the center of the disk vibrator with a small gap. To improve the pump performance, we seek for the optimum vibration distribution of the disk vibrator. When the thickness around the disk center becomes large, the shape of the vibration distribution near the center approaches to a piston vibrator. If the flatness of the vibration distribution is defined as the vibration amplitude just under the pipe edge divided by the vibration amplitude at the disk center, it is 92.0% for the original bending disk. The flatness of the new design became 98.1% as a result of the optimization of the thickness profile of the disk. The pump pressure became high as the flatness became large when the gap size was small enough. The maximum pump pressure of 20.6 kPa was achieved when the vibration velocity at the disk center was 1.0 m/s and the gap size was 10 μm, while the maximum flow rate of 22.5 ml/min. was obtained with the input electrical power of 3.8 W.