Study of valveless electromagnetic micropump by volume-of-fluid and OpenFOAM

The paper reports the first study on the backpressure of a valveless electromagnetic micropump using the volume-of-fluid (VOF) technique and open-source code OpenFOAM. The micropump consists of a vibrating diaphragm and fluidic microchannel connected to inlet and outlet tubes. The imbalance in fluid resistance of the fluidic microchannel during a vibration cycle of the diaphragm creates backpressure in the pump, which in turn produces a difference in water level between the inlet and outlet tubes. In this study, VOF was used in a transient simulation to obtain this difference in water level and then the backpressure. The obtained backpressure showed a slight discrepancy with the experimental data. The discrepancy was probably due to the difference in the wall surface quality of the fluidic microchannel between the simulation model and experimental device. These results are useful for analytical and numerical research on these types of micropumps and can easily be applied in an open-source code simulator with almost zero cost. (C) 2015 The Japan Society of Applied Physics