Additively Manufactured, Miniature Multi-Emitter Ionic Wind Pumps

Abstract

We report the design, fabrication, and characterization of the first miniature ionic wind pumps with monolithic, additively manufactured, multi-needle active electrodes. Our devices stably operate in air at atmospheric pressure and room temperature while generating a negative corona discharge. Our five-needle ionic wind pumps eject gas at 2.9 m/s and at a volumetric flow rate of 343 cm3/s, which is a threefold larger than the flow rate of a single-tip device with comparable efficiency. A model that efficiently and effectively predicts the long-timescale airflow characteristics from the computation intensive, short-timescale simulation of the corona process is presented and validated via experiments.