Development of a piezoelectric pump with ball valve structure

This study designs, fabricates and tests a piezoelectric pump with the structure of a polystyrene ball check valve. The structure of the check valve consists of three layers of specially designed polymethylmethacrylate plates and six polystyrene balls, which forms a particular three-layer constraint mechanism to limit the lateral and vertical displacement of the balls. The assembly of the ball valve can be completed with a simple placing operation, which simplifies the assembly process of the entire pump. The balls are lightweight, which is beneficial for working at high frequencies. The current design adopts two compressible spaces, and the equivalent analogue circuit of compressible spaces is established and analysed. Experimental results indicate that compressible spaces can alleviate the burden in the actuator and smoothen the flow rate pulsation in the long flow channel. The theoretical analysis and experimental tests reveal that this new piezoelectric pump is self-priming. A high flow rate of 99.6 mL/min and the maximum back pressure of 15.3 kPa are obtained when the pump is driven with a sinusoidal voltage of 448 Vpp at the resonant frequency of 790 Hz.