Design, fabrication and characterization of a novel gas microvalve using micro- and fine-machining

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design, fabrication and characterization of a novel gas microvalve realized by combining micro-and fine-machining techniques. The design is for high flow rates at high pressure difference between inlet and outlet, burst pressure of up to 15 bars. There is no power consumption required for the valve to maintain its position during operation in any intermediate state and the process gas does not interact with the actuation mechanism. The microvalve was experimentally characterized with air flows. It is shown that flow rates of 220 ml min −1 at a pressure difference of 4 bars could be achieved with a minimum accurate flow rate of 4 ml min .

Micro-fabricated membrane gas valves with a non-stiction coating deposited by C4F8/Ar plasma

“…Microvalves have many advantages including control of small sample volumes (<1 µl), short response times (<1 ms), low power consumption (i.e. potentially on the order of milliwatts for electrostatic actuation) [1] and on-chip integration [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Microvalves are used for liquid or gas control in a wide range of applications [1-3, 6, 7, 9-12].…”

A modular assembly method of a feed and thruster system for Cubesats

“…In this case the piezo-disc could not produce enough force to counteract the force required to close the valve, and thus the valve could not open. In recent decades, many micro-fabricated valves have been developed; their size mainly bound by the size of the actuator [21][22][23]. However, when leak-tightness is neck and crop, the conventional approach requires a large actuator to close the valve with sufficient force, the latter being in direct conflict with system miniaturization.…”

Design and analysis of a high pressure piezoelectric actuated microvalve

“…A study to design the microvalve for different operational modes has been carried out. To derive the specifications of the microvalve, models presented in [19,20] are used. All the modeling details have been presented in [19].…”

“…So with the boundary conditions p(a 1 ) = p 1 and p(a 2 ) = 1 bar, the force on the membrane is given by [19]…”

“…The design of the piezoelectric microvalve is an improvement over the stepper motor actuated microvalve that was presented earlier [19]. Figure 1 shows a cross-section of the device based on fine-and micro-machined piezoelectric microvalves.…”