For our project, we decided to go with the large pumps. Now we've asked ourselves what are the best fitting valves for them. In the following, I would like to ask some questions related to the calculation of airflow and pressure.
On the page of the pump is stated, that they provide a pressure of 130 KPA and an Air Flow of 6 l/min. For the sake of clarification: I use the values from the upper table on the page since the values in the lower image are deviating for some reason. For the valves the C (0.5 W, 0.3 MPa, Cv-factor: 0.016) and D (0.5W, 0.5 MPa, Cv-factor: 0.011) versions are the most interesting. Now I want to know which provides the highest pressure and the highest flow rates. Since the pump only delivers 130 KPA the valves are not the limiting factor and we can say, that 130 KPA is the maximum pressure. In the valve's datasheet in the table of Flow Specifications/Response Times is stated that C (the airflow?) is 0.060 [dm³/(s*bar)] for the C-valves and for 0.042 [dm³/(s*bar)] for the D-valves. Is it now correct to calculate the maximum airflow by using the 130 KPA (= 1.3 bar) from the pump as follows:
C: 0.060 * 1.3 bar = 0,0780 dm³ / second D: 0.042 * 1.3 bar = 0,0546 dm³ / second
If these calculations are correct I would assume that the C valves would provide a greater airflow.
If I'm messing up things here totally, maybe someone could provide me a good source that helps to understand how to calculate pressure and airflow for a given pump and valve.
In all cases, thanks for your help!
Thank you for elaborating on the different types of pumps. Building an XL Pump Module sounds very interesting. If we stay with these pumps, I'll try to modify the existing "Large Pump Module" case to an "XL Pump Module" case. I'll keep you posted whether we decide to stay with the XL pumps or using the ones fitting in the "Large Pump Module".
I now updated the BOM page to make it clearer which pumps are being used in which module; and which pumps were suggested as alternatives. It turns out that the pump to which you link is one of the alternative pump suggestions, which is bigger and more powerful than the one used in the "Large Pump Module". But we can easily create a module with that pump, that we can call "XL Pump Module". I just haven't used that pump previously to get an intuition for it's behavior.
Since any pump module of FlowIO has 2 pumps and allows you to connect the pumps in various different configurations including in Series or in Parallel, you can achieve higher pressures or higher flow rates than what individual pumps support. Higher pressures are achieved by connecting the two pumps in series, whereas higher flow-rates - when connecting the two pumps in parallel.
I have done some measurements of the pressures and flow rates at different configurations with the three pump modules, that I list in Table 1 of the published paper. And from those, it seems that the limiting factor of the valves is the flow rate.
It would be ideal to do measurements of pressures and flow rates for all the 4 different valve types to compare the results. Because the pressures and flow rates that you obtain from measurements will generally be quite different than those obtained based on component specifications alone. If I measure those in the near future, I will post the results here.