Publication

Abstract :

A miniaturize hydraulic gear pump is used for pressure generation in the fluidic actuators used in some of the medical and bio-medical devices such as blood pressure monitoring devices, artificial heart pump and prosthetic hands. A large variety of sizes of hydraulic pumps is commercially available. Proper design of the pump depends significantly on the application. Various designs of miniature hydraulic pumps have been developed in the past. In this paper, a custom made high pressure miniature hydraulic gear pump is designed and developed for bio medical application, which is not commercially available. Various design and analysis tools such as SolidWorks and ANSYS are used in developing the miniaturized gear pump. This paper aims at maximum pressure generation along with reduction in size of the pump to specifically reduce the weight of the devices. Comparative studies on different types of hydraulic pumps are carried out to select suitable pump for manufacturing. The evaluation and verification of design parameters are followed in design methodology. The analyses are carried out in ANSYS to study and understand deformation in gears. The gear pump is manufactured using both EDM (electro discharge machining) and conventional turning, milling and finally tested to verify its performance suitable for prosthetic hand application. A novel asymmetric metallic bellow flexible actuators (AMBFA) as the bending joints of the fingers are fabricated and tested using the developed pump. It is found that the pump is best suited for bending of these type of actuators in the development of prosthetic hand. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd.