Analysis of EHD pump with planer electrodes using FEM simulation

Abstract

As an aim to suppress the size of soft robotic system, we focused on to employ ElectroHydroDynamics (EHD), which occurs flow of fluid by applying voltage. EHD is a phenomenon induced by an interaction between fluid and electric field. In this paper, we fabricated EHD pumps with a 3D printer (Formlabs, Form 2) and a desktop cutting machine (SilhouetteCAMEO2). We employed double parallel electrodes composed of four planar electrodes into the flow channel. Different wiring patterns can be adopted with four planer electrodes. We measured the performance of the pumps on each wiring patterns. We compared results between the pressure generated with EHD pumps and electric field simulated using Finite Element Method (FEM) software (COMSOL). We analyzed distribution of electric field and voltage. From our results, we found that pressure increases as electric field increases in the system. In future work, we would use the simulation software to estimate the pressure generated by the EHD pumps and to optimize layout of electrodes.