Experimental investigation on phase transformation type micropump

The phase transformation type micropump without moving parts was experimentally studied in this note.To analyze the pumping mechanism of the micropump, a simplified physical model was presented. The experimental results indicate that the pump characteristic is mainly dependent on the heating and cooling conditions. For a given system, there exist an optimal combination of heating current and switch time with which the flow rate reaches maximum. Comparing with the natural cooling, the forced convective cooling needs larger heating current to obtain the same flow rate. In our experiments, the maximum flow rate is 33 μL/min when the inner diameter of the micropump is 200 μm, and the maximum pumping pressure reaches over 20 kPa. The theoretical analysis shows that the pumping mechanism of the micropump mainly lies in the large density difference between liquid and gas phases and the effect of gas chocking.