A micro diaphragm air pump for air supply of micro fuel cell

This paper presents a micro diaphragm air pump actuated by PZT bimorphs for air supply of micro fuel cell, which characterizes thin structure, large air flow, low power consumption, etc. We fabricated a prototype by precise manufacturing, whose size is 60/spl times/16/spl times/2mm. Simulations and experiments show that the diaphragm air pump has high efficiency and good performance. With a voltage of 20V, the air pump's flow is 85.3ml/min (the flow rate is about 0.2m/s) in resonance and its power consumption is only 3.18 mW.