Development of Synthetic-Jet based micro air pump for BOP system of mobile fuel cell

모바일 연료전지 BOP를 위한 Synthetic-Jet 기반 마이크로 에어펌프 개발

This paper presents a micro air pump actuated by PZT actuator (synthetic jet actuator) for air supply for micro fuel cells. The synthetic jet actuators are usually created by a traditional PZT-driven actuator, which consists of a small cylindrical cavity, in/outlet channel and PZT diaphragms. To design the micro air pump, a numerical analysis has been conducted for flow characteristics with respect to various geometries. A prototype of the micro air pump, with a size of $mm{\times}mm{\times}mm$, was fabricated by PDMS replication process and was conducted performance test. To control the PZT actuator, we used the SP4423 micro chips that can be amplified input voltage to reduce the controller size and the power consumption. With a voltage of 3V at 100Hz, the air pump's pumping pressure is 600pa and its power consumption is only 0.1mW.