Pumping Performance of a Valveless Micropump Using Three-Dimensional Electro-Fluid-Structural Interaction Simulation

In this study, the pumping performance of a piezoelectric valveless micropump is simulated. The micropump, which was developed in the previous work, is composed of a four-layer lightweight piezocomposite actuator, a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) pump chamber, and two diffusers. The piezoelectric domain, the structural domain and the fluid domain are coupled in the three-dimensional simulation. For structural part, we used ANSYS. The fluid flow simulation is done with ANSYS CFX. The water flow rates are numerically predicted for geometric parameters of the micropump such as diffuser length and diffuser angle. The simulation is also verified with the experiment and the simulation results are acceptable for predicting the pumping performance.