Abstract
This paper presents a new flow rate monitoring method for a piezoelectric micropump based on a self-sensing circuit. Utilizing the voltage generated by the secondary direct piezoelectric effect as the sensing voltage, a soft sensor of the piezoelectric actuator can be implemented onto the piezoelectric micropump. A bridge-type circuit is proposed as the self-sensing circuit, the piezoelectric micropump is fabricated with a circular piezoelectric actuator, the characteristics of the self-sensing voltage and the flow rate are experimentally investigated under different excitation voltages and frequencies. The results show that the method can accurately determine optimal frequency of the micropump (100 Hz, 280 Hz), and for a fixed frequency of 100 Hz and a voltage range of 50–180 V, the correlation between the self-sensing voltage and the flow rate is 0.9732. As a result, the method demonstrated in this paper allows precise monitoring of the flow rate of the piezoelectric micropump without using external sensors.
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Acknowledgments
This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.51805489) and Jilin Provincial Science and Technology Development Program of China (No. 2019030208 5GX).
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Hong Jiang received her Ph.D. from Jilin University in 2011. She is currently a Professor and a Master’s Supervisor at Changchun University of Technology. Her main research fields include optoelectronic devices, light source less sensors and weak signal processing.
Guohui Wu received his B.S. from Jining College, China in 2020. He is currently a Master’s Student in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Changchun University of Technology. His research focuses on piezoelectric pump, piezoelectric actuators and driving circuit.
Lipeng He is currently a Lecturer of School of Mechatronic Engineering, Changchun University of Technology, China. He received his Ph.D. from Mechatronics Engineering of Jilin University, China in 2010. His research focuses on piezoelectric pump, piezoelectric actuators and energy harvesting.
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Jiang, H., Wu, G., He, L. et al. A flow rate on-line monitoring method for piezoelectric pump based on self-sensing circuit. J Mech Sci Technol 36, 2415–2423 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-022-0424-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-022-0424-z