Study of existing designs of the peristaltic principle pumps

Abstract

Peristaltic pumps are used in a wide variety of applications due to their tightness, ease of maintenance and accurate delivery. Nevertheless, the use of peristaltic pumps is limited by their disadvantages: short service life of the working body and uneven feed. This work provides an overview of the existing design solutions for pumps. The main advantages and disadvantages of the most common modern designs of peristaltic pumps are considered. The developed design solutions are presented. These solutions are designed to extend the service life of the elastic working body of the pump. These include a spiral hose design, where hose life is improved by reducing the number of cyclic compressions using just one roller. Another solution is to operate the pump with incomplete compression of the working element, which reduces the stress values and thereby prolongs the service life of the working element. The special shapes of protrusions in the compression area were developed in order to compensate the decrease in flow caused by the operation of the pump with incomplete compression of the working member. The paper provides an overview of solutions to reduce the uneven flow of a peristaltic pump. The simplest of these is the use of multiple parallel channels. In other designs, the elimination of flow pulsations is achieved with a pneumatic damper. There is also a constructive solution, in which a special algorithm of actuation of five squeeze elements is used for uniform supply, each of which compresses only its own section of the pump working body. Based on the analysis, it is shown that in order to eliminate the disadvantages of peristaltic pumps the various methods are used. Nevertheless, those methods need further improvement.