Innovative Piezoelectric Air Pump Manufacturing Technology

Dynamic Structures and Materials, LLC (DSM) proposes an innovative manufacturing technology for piezoelectric air pumps. The novel approach for manufacturing will take piezoelectric pumps, which have been generally designed and manufactured using a hand intensive process, from a laboratory stage to a production ready stage. Bringing the piezoelectric pump to a production stage will make them valuable as compact, efficient and quiet air-flow pumps for the emerging fuel cell market. Piezoelectric drive pumps have significant advantages over conventional electromagnetic driven pump technologies in the area of weight, reliability and low acoustic signature. The pump design will gain its "smarts" by incorporating an on board micro-controller to coordinate the pumping control and monitor flow output. The manufacturing improvements will focus on less expensive machining and production methods for compact flexure based mechanisms and assembly methods for reducing the hand intensive processes used in traditional piezoelectric device assembly.