Numerical simulation of low-pulsation gerotor pumps for use in the pharmaceutical industry and in biomedicine

Abstract

The reduction of the pulsation of flow and pressure as well as the increase of the mean flow of a displacement pump will be a benefit to many technical processes, especially in the pharmaceutical industry and in biomedicine. By reducing the flow pulsation, microreactors could work more efficiently and thin-film coatings or fluids in biomedical applications could be applied with more precision. This article presents a new toolbox to analyse and compare different types of gerotor pump gear profiles. The main objective was the development of a toolbox to analyse the mean flow and the flow ripple of theoretical and reverse engineered gerotor gear sets. For that reason, the presented toolbox does not work with analytic functions, but with numerical methods based on point cloud data. A comparison of four different profile types shows that these profiles perform very differently if they are limited by a given maximal outer root diameter and by the numbers of the teeth of both rotors.

Keywords

• gerotor
• pump
• flow ripple
• flow pulsation
• pressure ripple
• pressure angle
• simulation