Analysis on flow field of the valveless piezoelectric pump with two inlets and one outlet and a rotating unsymmetrical slopes element

Typically, liquid pump and liquids mixer are two separate devices. The invention of piezoelectric pump makes it possible to integrate the two devices. Hower, the existing piezoelectric mixing-pumps are larger because the need the space outside the chamber, and another shortcome of them is that they cannot adjust the mixing ratio of two liquids. In this paper, a new piezoelectric pump being capable of integrating mixer and pump is presented, based on the theory of the piezoelectric pump with the unsymmetrical slopes element (USE). Besides the features of two inlets and one outlet, the piezoelectric pump has a rotatable unsymmetrical slopes element(RUSE). When the pump works, two fluids flow into the inlet channels respectively. Then the RUSE controls the ratio of the two flows by adjusting the flow resistances of the two inlet channels. The fluids form a net flow due to the USE principle, while they are mixed into a homogeneous solution due to strong turbulence flow field and complex vortices generated by RUSE in the chamber. And then the solution flows through the outlet. Firstly, the theoretical analysis on this pump is performed. Meanwhile, the flow field in the chamber is calculated and simulated. And then, the relationship between the flows of the two channels and the rotating angle of the RUSE is set up and analyzed. Finally, experiment with the proposed pump is carried out to verify the numerical results. A RUSE with 20° slope angle is used in the experiment. Four sets of data are tested with the RUSE at the rotating angles of 0°, 6°, 11°, and 16°, respectively, corresponding to the numerical models. The experimental results show that the empirical data and the theoretical data share the same trend. The maximum error between the theoretical flow and the experimental flow is 11.14%, and the maximum error between the theoretical flow ratio of the two inlets and the experimental one is 2.5%. The experiment verified the theoretical analysis. The proposed research provides a new idea for integration of micro liquids mixer and micro liquids pump.