Experimental Investigation of Piezoelectric Micropumps with Single, Series or Parallel Pump Chambers

Three types of piezoelectric micropumps following different configurations: single, series, and parallel connection, are developed and investigated. All the micropumps are fabricated by wet etching technology and sealed by high temperature glass bonding. They share the same dimension characteristic of diffuser/nozzle microchannels. Verifying the impact of adding series or parallel connected pump chambers on single chambers, as well as verifying the performance of the flow rate, pressure and piezoelectric transducer vibration of three micropumps have been examined. Through the comparisons between three kinds of micropumps, the results show that the flow rate of the micropumps with parallel connected pump chambers have a higher flow rate than that of micropumps with single and serial connected pump chambers under the same driving conditions. In addition, both the flow rate and pressure with the serial micropump are the lowest. The pressure of the micropump with single pump chamber is larger than other kinds of micropumps at certain driving frequencies. Consequently, increasing the pump chambers cannot always increase the performance of the micropump. This coincides with the theory analysis. Finally, the vibration performance of piezoelectric transducers with three micropumps have been carried out. The parallel transducer has a higher vibration displacement than the other two kinds of micropumps. These results have great potentials for integration into labs with a chip or microfluidic driven systems.